Access certification is the process of systematically reviewing and validating user access rights across enterprise systems to ensure that every user, account, and entitlement is appropriate, authorized, and necessary. Organizations run access certification campaigns to confirm who has access to what, remove excessive permissions, and generate audit evidence for regulatory compliance. It is one of the most critical controls in any identity governance and administration (IGA) program.

Every enterprise faces the same underlying problem: user access accumulates over time. Employees change roles, contractors finish projects, systems get retired, and yet access permissions linger. What starts as a well-scoped access model quickly becomes a tangled web of excessive privileges, orphaned accounts, and dormant credentials. That is the access problem at scale, and it is precisely what access certification is designed to solve.