Role-based access control (RBAC) is an approach to restricting system access to authorized users and implementing mandatory access control or discretionary access control. It is a policy-neutral access control mechanism defined around roles and privileges. RBAC is a model for controlling access to resources where permitted actions on resources are identified with roles rather than with individual subject identities.
In RBAC, network access is restricted based on the roles of individual users within an organization. The roles in RBAC refer to the levels of access that employees have to the network. Permissions are allocated only with enough access as needed for employees to do their jobs. RBAC can be used to facilitate administration of security in large organizations with hundreds of users and thousands of permissions.
Examples of RBAC include a basic role that includes the access every employee needs, such as to email and the corporate intranet, and a customer service representative who has read and write access to the customer database. Through RBAC, you can control what end-users can do at both broad and granular levels. You can designate whether the user is an administrator, a specialist user, or an end-user, and align roles and access permissions with your employees’ positions in the organization.
Benefits of RBAC include:
- Simplicity: RBAC offers a simple, manageable approach to access control.
- Scalability: As your user base increases in scale and complexity, roles become particularly useful.
- Efficiency: Users no longer need to be managed individually, but instead have privileges that conform to the permissions assigned to their role(s).
- Security: RBAC can help in securing a company’s sensitive data and important applications.
- Compliance: RBAC can help organizations more effectively comply with regulatory and statutory requirements for confidentiality and privacy.
In summary, RBAC is a method of restricting network access based on the roles of individual users within an enterprise. It is a simple, manageable, and scalable approach to access control that can help organizations improve security and compliance.
