“Most IaaS accounts use a small fraction of the entitlements assigned to them. Overprovisioned entitlements greatly increase the attack surface, making an organization more vulnerable to cyberattacks. The problem of overprovisioned entitlements on-premises, while not as acute, still poses a huge risk to organizations.”
— Gartner®*

This insight says it all: many organizations have IT landscapes full of overprivileged identities just waiting to become a security problem.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) is Oracle’s next-generation cloud platform designed to run mission-critical applications with high performance, security, and reliability. It offers a broad set of cloud services – including compute, storage, networking, databases, and security – optimized for enterprise workloads. OCI combines the flexibility and scalability of public cloud with the control and performance of on-premises infrastructure, enabling organizations to modernize their IT environments while maintaining enterprise-grade governance and resilience.

As organizations scale their OCI environments, managing the increasing number of identities is critical. Without strong oversight, users may accumulate excessive access while policy management and compliance tasks become increasingly complex.

Oracle Access Governance is a cloud-native identity governance solution that provides control and security enforcement over OCI Identity and Access Management (IAM). Built to complement and govern OCI IAM itself, it offers centralized visibility into user access, roles, and policies across OCI environments – see Figure 1. Access Governance streamlines access reviews, automates certifications, enforces least-privilege access, and helps organizations maintain continuous compliance. With intelligent policy insights – like flagging high risks – and automated remediation, Oracle Access Governance empowers organizations to reduce identity risk and strengthen security across their entire OCI footprint.

Access Governance Enterprise-wide Browser
Figure 1: Access Governance Enterprise-wide Browser.

 

Why does identity governance matter in OCI?

Let’s start with a simple scenario: a contractor finishes a project, but their access to production systems never gets revoked. Without identity governance oversight, weeks later they may still have access to data within your OCI Object Storage bucket.

That’s not just an oversight – it’s a risk. And managing these risks becomes increasingly complex as an organization scales.

Here’s where the pain points stack up:

  • Shadow Resources: Teams spin up compute instances or storage buckets with overly broad access, often without notifying security teams.
  • Policy Confusion: Multiple teams define ad-hoc policies. Now no one knows who has access to what – or why.
  • Overprivileged Users: Developers, contractors, even service accounts collect permissions over time, often way more than they need.
  • Manual Compliance: Auditors ask for access reviews, and you’re stuck digging through spreadsheets trying to prove least privilege.

The result? Poor visibility, policy sprawl, and a growing attack surface.

 

How can Oracle Access Governance help?

While OCI IAM provides access control, MFA, authentication and authorization – the identities, entitlements, roles, and policies overseeing the use of infrastructure components needs to be governed. Oracle Access Governance fills that gap by giving you identity governance at scale. That means:

  • With Access Governance, provisioning abides by proper approval workflows which can be reviewed.
  • Clear visibility into who has access, how they got it, when they got it, whether they are using the entitlements, and whether they still need it.
  • Periodic and automated reviews so managers can certify access without guesswork, while being delivered in plain language instead of having to decipher the policy grammar itself.
  • Policy insights that highlight risky identities impacted by a policy or overly broad permissions – see Figure 2.
Access Governance policy review
Figure 2: Access Governance policy reviews.
  • Provisioning and deprovisioning that keeps up with joiners, movers, and leavers that occur within an authoritative source such as an HR system. This can help eliminate the problem where a user has left the company, but their cloud footprint remains – see Figure 3.
Access Governance provisioning.
Figure 3: Access Governance provisioning for OCI.
  • One place to manage access across all your OCI tenancies within and across regions.  It can also manage access across all other applications and services running in the cloud or on-premises.

In short, it takes the manual guesswork out of governance and makes your identity program automated and proactive – not reactive.

 

When should you use Oracle Access Governance?

If you’re seeing any of the following, it’s time to act:

  • If you have more than 10 users authorized to work on infrastructure components in any given tenancy and authoring policies.
  • Your Development, Test, and Production environments each have their own IAM setup — and it’s getting hard to manage.
  • Users who left the company or changed roles still show up in OCI IAM.
  • Your access reviews are spreadsheet-driven and barely scratch the surface.
  • You’re storing sensitive data in OCI — such as financial info, or healthcare records which requires supervision.
  • You’ve got mission-critical apps running in OCI, but no strong process to enforce least privilege.
  • There are dormant or inactive accounts with high privileges.
  • You can’t tell who owns service accounts or automation identities.
  • You manage multiple OCI tenancies and policies aren’t consistent across them.

These are real governance challenges. And they don’t fix themselves. Oracle Access Governance for OCI can help.

 

How do OCI IAM and Access Governance Work Together?

Think of it this way:

  • OCI IAM handles the “who can do what” aspect of digital transaction
  • Oracle Access Governance handles the “should they still be able to do it?”

OCI IAM sets the access controls. Access Governance gives you the insight, automation, and remediation to make sure those controls are still appropriate – day after day, user after user.

Together, they help you:

  • Enforce least privilege
  • Stay audit-ready
  • Reduce risk from overprivileged users
  • Streamline identity operations across cloud teams

 

Final Word: Start Early, Stay Secure

Implement Oracle Access Governance early – ideally from Day 1 – to avoid privilege sprawl, reduce manual effort, and stay compliant as your OCI environment grows.

This is especially critical for regulated industries like finance and healthcare, where exercising control over user access isn’t optional – it’s mandatory.

By taking a comprehensive, proactive approach to identity governance, you can secure your OCI environment, simplify compliance, and protect what matters most.

Need help getting started with Access Governance in your OCI environment? See the following resources to get started:

 

*Source: https://www.gartner.com/document-reader/document/6043635?ref=dochist Gartner, Best Practices for Improving IGA Access Certification Outcomes, Gautham Mudra, 26 December 2024

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