Best Practices for Managing User Permissions in Access Control Systems
Good permission management looks boring when it works, and disastrous when it does not. Most incidents I have investigated over the years did not start with advanced malware or exotic exploits. They started with a single account that had far more access than it ever needed.
If you run or design a security management system or any access control system, you sit right where business convenience and security collide. Sales wants fast access, finance wants control, operations wants automation, and security wants to sleep at night. Thoughtful permission design is how you keep all of them reasonably happy.
This guide walks through practical, field-tested approaches to managing user permissions in real organizations, not textbook ones. Expect trade‑offs, examples, and a few scar tissue lessons.
Why user permissions matter more than you think
User permissions are the connective tissue between your systems and your people. Get them wrong, and you create three distinct problems.
First, you increase the blast radius of any compromise. If a stolen password belongs to an account that can approve payments, export all customer records, and provision new users, your attacker does not need much creativity.
Second, you create operational friction. Overly strict access slows work, triggers constant access requests, and leads to shadow IT as people find their own workarounds. When people start sharing logins or copying data into personal tools because the official system is too rigid, your access control system has already failed.
Third, you confuse accountability. When multiple people share generic accounts, or when permissions do not reflect real responsibilities, investigations become guesswork. I have sat in post‑incident reviews where everyone swore they never touched a compromised resource, because the logs all pointed to a shared “Admin” account.
Robust, well‑managed permissions solve all three issues at once: smaller blast radius, smoother work, and clearer accountability.
Start with a permission model, not a list of users
Many organizations make the same mistake. They start assigning permissions user by user, based on requests and exceptions. After a year or two, nobody remembers why a certain analyst can approve vendor bills in the finance system or why a contractor from three summers ago still shows up as an admin on the access control system for doors.
Experienced teams start the other way around. They define a permission model first, then map people into it.
A workable permission model usually has three layers: roles, resources, and actions.
Roles reflect job responsibilities, not job titles. “Support Tier 1” is a good role. “Manager” is not. security management system You want roles that describe what the person actually does in the system, not where they sit in the org chart.
Resources are the things people access. In a physical access control system, that might be “Data Center Room”, “Executive Floor”, or “Warehouse Perimeter Gates”. In a software security management system, resources might be “Customer Billing Dataset”, “Admin Configuration Panel”, or “Audit Log Export”.
Actions define what can be done to each resource. For digital applications that might be “view”, “edit”, “approve”, “delete”, “export”, or “configure”. For physical access it could be “card entry”, “remote unlock”, “schedule override”, or “badge issuance”.
Once you see permissions in this three‑part structure, it becomes much easier to be consistent and deliberate.
Core principles that should guide permission design
There are a handful of ideas that keep showing up in every mature security program I have seen. When organizations ignore them, they eventually pay for it. When they embrace them, a lot of problems quietly disappear.
You can think of the key principles like this:
Least privilege: Every account has the minimum access needed for its job, not “whatever is easiest to grant”. Separation of duties: No single person can perform every step of a sensitive or high‑risk process, such as creating a new vendor and also paying that vendor. Defense in depth: Important actions require more than just “being logged in”, for example a second factor, re‑authentication, or an approval by someone else. Accountability and traceability: Every critical action can be tied to a specific, named account, with enough logging detail to reconstruct what happened. Reversibility and review: It is easy to remove access quickly and to review who has what on a regular schedule.
These sound simple. The difficulty comes when business pressure says “just give them access, we have a deadline” or when legacy systems do not support fine‑grained controls. That is where experience and judgment matter.
Role‑based access control done right (and wrong)
Most organizations use some form of role‑based access control, even if they do not call it that. In theory, RBAC means you grant permissions to roles, then assign people to roles. In practice, it often degenerates into a forest of near‑duplicate roles with tiny differences that nobody understands.
I once reviewed a mid‑sized company whose HR system had 147 roles for fewer than 500 employees. When we printed them out, about 20 names were some variation of “HR Analyst 1/2/3”, “HR Analyst Special”, or “HR Analyst Legacy”. Nobody dared delete any of them, because “somebody might still be using that”.
Healthy RBAC has a few characteristics.
Roles are stable and clearly defined. You might occasionally adjust their permissions, but you do not create a new role every time someone asks for a small exception. If you do need role variants, they are purposefully named, like “Finance AP Approver” vs “Finance AP Viewer”.
Role assignment follows a process. People get mapped to roles as part of onboarding, based on their documented duties. Managers and system owners review role assignments, not individual permissions. Auditors can look at a role and instantly understand its risk level.
The number of roles is controlled. There is no universal “correct” number, but when you have more roles than employees, you probably have a problem. As a very rough heuristic, a typical organization might land in a range of a few dozen to low hundreds, depending on size and complexity. The key is not the count itself, but whether you can explain why each role exists.
Bad RBAC is usually the result of bypassing the model whenever a shortcut feels easier. Every “temporary exception” that becomes permanent, every one‑off custom permission set for a VIP, every shared role created for a project that never got cleaned up, all of that slowly corrodes your structure.
When RBAC is not enough: attributes and context
Classic role‑based models sometimes struggle with dynamic conditions. Consider these examples:
A field engineer should be able to unlock a remote site gate, but only during their scheduled maintenance window and only while they are within a certain distance of the site.
A finance contractor should have access to last quarter’s data but not current transactions, and their access should automatically expire on their contract end date.
A helpdesk technician should be able to reset most user passwords, but not those of executives or system administrators.
Trying to encode all of this solely with static roles quickly becomes messy. This is where attribute‑based or context‑aware controls help. Instead of “Role X can always do Action Y”, you get rules like “Role X can do Action Y only if Condition Z is true”.
Useful attributes include time of day, location, device health, employment status, team membership, and risk score. Modern security management systems often combine role‑based and attribute‑based controls, using roles as the baseline and attributes for nuance.
The downside is complexity. Poorly designed attribute rules can confuse users and overload administrators. If someone in operations cannot tell you why a particular request was denied, your system is too opaque. Keep rules as simple as possible and document them in plain language.
Designing permissions for physical access control
People often underestimate how similar physical and digital access problems are. A door badge that opens every room on a campus is the physical equivalent of a domain admin account in IT.
When you manage a physical access control system, the same principles apply, but the failure modes are more tangible. A bad badge profile can literally let someone walk into a server room, a pharmaceutical storage area, or a trading floor without challenge.
Thoughtful practices in this space include aligning zones with real work patterns, tightening special privileges, and separating duties even for door control.
Zones should reflect how people actually move. If the cleaning crew only needs access to office floors and not the lab, their badge templates should reflect that. Overlapping access groups that evolved through years of ad‑hoc exceptions make it very difficult to revoke access cleanly when someone changes roles.
Special privileges such as “global unlock” or “permanent schedule override” should be rare, assigned to specific roles like Security Supervisor, and wrapped in additional protections. A lost badge with that level of access is a serious event.
Separation of duties can apply as well. The person who issues badges should not be the same person who approves access to high‑security areas. Visitors should have entirely different badge types, clearly marked and automatically set to expire. When physical and IT access are tightly integrated, revoking one should trigger a check on the other.
Onboarding: giving people the right access, right away
The fastest way to create permission chaos is to treat onboarding as a manual art project. Someone starts a new job, their manager sends a vague email like “Please give Priya whatever access the rest of the team has”, and administrators rush to copy permissions from a colleague.
That copy‑and‑paste approach bakes old mistakes into new accounts. If the “rest of the team” has a few unnecessary privileges, you just propagated them again.
A cleaner way is to formalize access profiles for each role. When HR or your identity platform receives a new hire event, it should trigger a standard access package: group memberships, application access, and physical badges based on the person’s location and department.
Managers should still have a say, but they work from a baseline, not from scratch. If a manager requests extra access beyond the standard package, that exception should have an approver, a reason, and ideally an expiry date.
Good onboarding also includes multi‑factor enrollment, training on acceptable use, and clear communication of what to do if someone cannot access what they need. I have seen organizations sabotage their own security by making access request processes so slow and opaque that people resorted to shared accounts “just until the ticket clears”.
Offboarding and the forgotten account problem
Turnover is a fact of life. Contracts end, employees move on, teams restructure. Every departure leaves behind a trail of accounts, access tokens, SSH keys, and door badges. If you do not have a disciplined offboarding process, those leftovers turn into an attacker’s buffet.
In investigations after breaches, I have often found that one of the most privileged accounts belonged to someone who left the company months or even years earlier. The account was never disabled because nobody owned the full picture across systems.
The only reliable way to avoid this is to tie identity lifecycle to a single source of truth, usually HR. When someone’s employment status changes to “terminated” or “contract ended”, your identity platform should immediately begin a scripted deprovisioning flow.
That flow should disable login, revoke tokens, block physical badges, and remove the user from critical groups. For certain high‑risk roles, such as admins or finance approvers, you may also want a manual review step where a security or IT lead double‑checks that nothing remains.
Special attention is needed for shared accounts, service accounts, and vendor access. If a contractor used a named account that is clearly tied to them, life is straightforward. If they used a generic “SupportVendor” account shared across multiple individuals, you have more work to do: either retire that pattern or introduce credential rotation and auditing strict enough to compensate.
Periodic reviews: the unglamorous work that prevents incidents
Most organizations understand, at least in principle, that they should review access regularly. Few enjoy doing it. Permission reviews feel tedious, especially when the tooling is poor.
Yet when audits or incidents hit, a well‑run review program often makes the difference between a quick, confident response and days of manual data wrangling.
A practical review cadence often looks like this: high‑risk systems quarterly, medium‑risk systems twice a year, and low‑risk systems annually. “Risk” in this context means the impact of misuse, not the technical sophistication of the system. Your security management system that controls door access and alarm panels might rank as high or higher risk than an internal wiki.
Reviews work best when you provide context and make them as painless as possible. Instead of dumping a spreadsheet with thousands of names and checkboxes on a manager, group users by role and highlight anomalies. Examples of anomalies include someone with access who no longer reports to that manager, or a role assignment that is rare in that team.
The reviewers you pick matter. Managers understand who does what work, but may not grasp technical implications of certain permissions. System owners understand the technology but might not know every person in the list. Combining their perspectives produces better results.
You should also track metrics: percentage of users reviewed on time, number of access removals per cycle, and time taken to complete reviews. When those numbers stagnate or start to climb, treat it as an early warning signal.
Handling privileged and administrative accounts
Not all accounts are equal. Admin and other high‑privilege accounts deserve special handling, above and beyond general good practice.
A pattern I see often in mature environments is the split identity approach. Administrators have two accounts: a regular user account for email, collaboration tools, and general work, and a separate, tightly controlled admin account used only when elevated privileges are required.
The admin account typically has stricter controls: stronger authentication, limited internet access, more frequent password changes or passwordless mechanisms, and heavier monitoring. In some cases, privileged access is granted just in time, for a bounded window, rather than being permanent.
Shared admin accounts are a red flag. Sometimes they are unavoidable for legacy systems that truly support only a single admin identity. Even there, you can wrap them in a privileged access management (PAM) layer that records who checked out the credentials, when, and for what purpose, and that automatically rotates passwords after use.
One useful habit is to periodically try to perform critical actions without your admin account and see what fails. If you discover you can modify firewall rules, approve large payments, or unlock secure doors using only your regular user account, your privilege boundaries need tightening.
Monitoring, logging, and responding to permission misuse
Granting access is only half the story. You also need visibility into how that access is used, and a plan for what to do when something looks wrong.
Effective logging captures who did what, to which resource, from where, using which device, and whether it succeeded or failed. The goal is not to record everything forever, but to log enough that you can answer key questions after an incident.
You want to know, for instance, whether a batch of suspicious transactions came from a single compromised account, from multiple accounts with similar permissions, or from an internal user abusing legitimate privileges.
In a well‑integrated security management system, digital and physical logs inform each other. If someone accesses the data center remotely at 2 a.m. using VPN credentials, but their badge was never used to enter the building, that should raise your eyebrows. Conversely, repeated badge attempts on a restricted door by someone with no corresponding system access requests might indicate tailgating or social engineering.
Alert fatigue is a real risk. Rushing to enable every possible policy and alert can drown your team in noise. Start with a small, focused set of high‑value detections: anomalous admin activity, large data exports, off‑hours high‑risk actions, and repeated access denials to sensitive resources.
Most importantly, rehearse your response. When an alert triggers, who investigates, what data do they pull, and who decides whether to revoke access? The middle of a live incident is not the time to invent that playbook.
Practical steps to improve your permissions in the next quarter
If you are staring at a tangled set of permissions and legacy patterns, it can feel daunting to fix. The good news is that you do not need a full redesign to make meaningful progress over the next few months.
Here is a realistic, staged approach that I have seen work in many environments:
Pick three critical systems and document their current roles, high‑risk permissions, and who has them. Focus on your main access control system, your financial platform, and your identity provider or directory. For each of those systems, define or refine a small set of standard roles that you are confident about. Start with the most common job functions, not the edge cases. Clean up the worst outliers first: orphaned accounts, admin privileges held by non‑admins, and shared generic logins with broad access. Implement a basic quarterly review for those same three systems and commit to running it at least twice, improving the process each time. Align onboarding and offboarding with the updated roles, so that new accounts follow the improved pattern rather than the old one.
By the time you cycle through that, you will have better visibility into your highest‑risk areas, fewer lingering “what on earth is this account” surprises, and a repeatable pattern you can extend to other systems.
Permission management will never be glamorous, but when practiced with intention, it quietly reduces risk, supports the business, and makes every other part of your security program easier to run.
