For many business leaders, access reviews are seen purely through the lens of compliance—a “check-the-box” activity for SOX or the new European NIS 2 directive. However, the case study with one of our customers reveals that modern access governance through a platform like Squarum is actually one of the most effective tools for financial optimization.

Finding the right way to manage user access is often a “Goldilocks” problem: some tools are too manual, some are too complex, and only one feels just right.

Whether you’re prepping for a SOC2 audit or just trying to keep your data secure, here are the top 3 tools for User Access Reviews (UAR) in 2026.

In the world of IT security and compliance, the term “access review” often conjures images of endless spreadsheets, frantic emails, and “rubber-stamping” by overwhelmed managers. For many organizations, the reality of manual Excel-based access reviews is a process that is slow, error-prone, and fundamentally unscalable.

Think of having twenty critical apps and doing quarterly reviews of each app users and their level of access with Excel and Sharepoint. That makes eighty access reviews to run yearly with a tool not optimized for doing the job.