Using multi-stage reviews to meet your attestation and certification needs with Microsoft Entra

Article
04/09/2024

Microsoft Entra access reviews support up to three review stages, in which multiple types of reviewers engage in determining who still needs access to company resources. These reviews could be for membership in groups or teams, access to applications, assignments to privileged roles, or access package assignments. When review administrators configure the review for automatic application of decisions, at the end of the review period, access is revoked for denied users.

Use cases for multi-stage reviews

Multi-stage access reviews allow you and your organization to enable complex workflows to meet recertification and audit requirements calling for multiple reviewers to attest to access for users in a particular sequence. It also helps you design more efficient reviews for your resource owners and auditors by reducing the number of decisions each reviewer is accountable for. This approach allows for combining otherwise disjoint, separate reviews for the same resource, to be combined in one access review.

Here are some scenarios you might want to consider:

Reach consensus across multiple sets of reviewers: Let two audiences of reviewers independently review access to a resource. You can configure reviews such that both stages of reviewers must agree on Approved without seeing each other’s decisions.
Assign alternate reviewers to weigh in on unreviewed decisions: Let the resource owner attest to access to their resource first. Then, users for which no decision is recorded, go to a second stage reviewer, such as the user’s manager or an auditing team, who review the undecided requests.
Reduce burden on later-stage reviewers: Reviews can be configured such that earlier-stage-denied users aren't reviewed by later stages, allowing for later stage reviewers to see a filtered-down list. Use this scenario to filter down on users to review, stage by stage.

Reach consensus across multiple sets of reviewers

Reaching quorum on the right access for users can be difficult. For resources that many users have access to, or for a diverse group of users that need to be reviewed, it's especially hard for any single reviewer to make the right choices for all reviewees. Reaching consensus by giving up to three different reviewer groups the opportunity to record decisions and by showing what the earlier reviewer audiences said helps drive consensus on who should have access to the resource.

An example would be a review that consists of three stages that determines group membership to a group that governs access to a resource. In the review settings, the administrator chooses to not show decisions of earlier stage reviewers. This configuration allows for every review audience, for example the user’s manager, the group owner and a security officer to review access independently. The three stages are lined up with increased importance of reviewer audience weight, with decisions from the last reviewer audience potentially overwriting earlier-stage reviewer’s decisions.

The configuration for this scenario would look like this:

Attribute	Configuration
Multi-stage review	Enabled
First stage reviewers	Managers of users
Second stage reviewers	Group owners
Third stage reviewers	Select user(s) or group(s) – “Contoso auditors group”
Show previous stage(s) decisions to later stage reviewers	Enabled
Reviewees going to the next stage	Select all
If reviewers don’t respond	Remove access

Assign alternate reviewers to weigh in on unreviewed decisions

For scenarios that you need decisions recorded and need to make sure that access is preserved for the right people, multi-stage reviews let you progress a subset of reviewees to the next stage, that potentially needs a second reviewer audience for double-checking or decision making. Use this pattern to ensure that there are fewer unreviewed users or users marked as Don’t know, by progressing these reviewees to another stage, and having another group of reviewers take decisions.

An example would be a review that contains two stages that determines access to an application. In the review settings, the review administrator chooses to Show previous stage(s) decisions to later stage reviewers. For Reviewees going to the next stage, the decisions that need confirmation would be added: to ensure all reviewees have a decision, select reviewees marked as ‘Don’t know’ and Not reviewed reviewees, so that later-stage reviewers only see the undecided or unsure reviewees to retain the right access.

Attribute	Configuration
Multi-stage review	Enabled
First stage reviewers	Select user(s) or group(s) – the owner(s) of the applications
Second stage reviewers	Managers of users
Show previous stage(s) decisions to later stage reviewers	Disabled
Reviewees going to the next stage	Select Not reviewed reviewees and Reviewees marked as ‘Don’t know’
If reviewers don’t respond	Approve Access

Reduce burden on later stage reviewers

For reviews that might contain many reviewees, or users to be reviewed and attested, you could require all end users to self-attest before they're reviewed by a resource owner or their manager in a later stage. This model allows for filtering reviewees from stage to stage, progressing reviewees that have self-approved, only.

Later stage reviewers, such as user’s managers, or the resource owner, only see the reduced list of reviewees – those that approved previously. The number of reviewees per stage decreases stage by stage. Only the users that have been approved through all three stages preserve access.

An example would be a review of a group that grants an IT exception, that an administrator wants to regularly review. As that exception is popular, users are asked to respond first, and only those that responded that they still need the exception, are progressed to the second stage, where their manager decides. Only if the user and the manager approve, IT owners for the exception get to see the list of users who still need and want the exception, look at a reduced list of reviewees.

Attribute	Configuration
Multi-stage review	Enabled
First stage reviewers	Users review their own access
Second stage reviewers	Managers of users
Third stage reviewers	Group owner(s)
Show previous stage(s) decisions to later stage reviewers	Disabled
Reviewees going to the next stage	Select Approved reviewees
If reviewers don’t respond	Remove Access

Guest user reviews

Guest user reviews help organizations that use Microsoft Entra B2B for collaboration. These guest users’ access should be reviewed regularly to check on whether these guest users have the right access still, and that collaboration is still desired, so revoking access or a cleanup of guest user accounts that are no longer needed is possible.

This scenario can be configured with multi-stage reviews similar to how the "Reduce burden on later stage reviewers" scenario works. First, ask guest users to self-review and attest their continued interest and need for collaboration, including the requirement to provide a business justification. Only self-approved guests are progressed to a later stage, where a sponsor or other employee approves or denies continued access or collaboration.

For guest user reviews, also consider leveraging the Inactive users (on tenant level) only setting. This will scope the review to inactive external users that haven't signed in to the resource tenant in the number of specified days.

In scenarios for guest users, Access Reviews supports an extra configuration option: Action to apply on denied guest users, which can result in either:

Remove user’s membership from the resource
Block user from signing-in for 30 days, then remove user from the tenant

Depending on your review needs, guest users that aren’t responding to the review request, or decline further collaboration, can be removed automatically from your tenant. This results in a blocked B2B guest user account for 30 days, following an account deletion.

Attribute	Configuration
Inactive users (on tenant level) only	180 days
Multi-stage review	Enabled
First stage reviewers	Users review their own access
Second stage reviewers	Group owner(s)
Show previous stage(s) decisions to later stage reviewers	Disabled
Reviewees going to the next stage	Select Approved reviewees
If reviewers don’t respond	Remove Access
Action to apply on denied guest users	Block user from signing-in for 30 days, then remove user from the tenant

Note

The Action to apply on denied guest users setting is only visible in the review creation process if the Access Review scope is configured as Guest users only.

Duration of review stages

Review administrators define the duration of every review stage and therefore, how much time reviewers in their stage have to record their decisions. Each stage can be configured to have its own duration, to cater for availability and expectation of reviewers.

Each review stage stays open for reviewers to add decisions for the length of the duration. Review administrators can stop a running stage and automatically progress the overall review to the next review stage on the reviewer overview page, by selecting Stop current stage.

Application of results

Microsoft Entra access reviews can apply decisions about access to a resource by removing no longer needed users from the resource. Decisions are always applied at the end of the review period or when a review administrator manually ends the review. Automatic application of results is defined by the review administrator with the Auto apply results to resource setting or manually through the Apply results button in the review overview page.

Decisions are collected by reviewers for every stage. The setting Reviewees going to the next stage defines, which reviewees later stage reviewers will see and asked to record decisions for. Only at the end of the overall review, decisions are applied to the resource.

For all decisions, the last decision recorded for a reviewee is applied at the end of the review. Decisions that were made for Jane in the first stage of the review, can in stage two and stage three be overwritten by later-stage reviewers.

If the Reviewees going to the next stage setting is set such that only a subset of reviewees progress to later stages, it can be that decisions made in the first stage are applied at the end of the review. If the review administrator configured a three-stage review, and wants only Denied and Not reviewed reviewees to progress to the next stages, if Jane was approved in the first stage, she won't progress to the later stages and her Approve decision is recorded and at the end of the review, applied.