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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 “user 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 user access reviews is a process that is slow, error-prone, and fundamentally unscalable.

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

Conducting regular User Access Reviews (UAR) has become a key element of IT and data security in many laws and standards. Below we examine three major frameworks: the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), ISO 27001, and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).