Key Points
- A maker-checker process separates who creates a policy from who approves it, helping reduce risk, prevent mistakes, and enforce proper separation of duties.
- By adding intentional friction to the approval process, maker-checker workflows encourage deliberate review and create a clear audit trail for important changes.
- Strong maker-checker controls support compliance by clearly defining roles, documenting approvals, and preventing unilateral high-impact changes.
- Tools like role-based access control, approval workflows, notifications, and audit logging help route reviews to approvers on time while preserving decision history.
- Effective maker-checker implementation focuses approvals on high-risk changes, includes clear emergency procedures, and relies on documented standards to preserve operational efficiency.
The maker-checker governance pattern ensures the separation of duties within an organization. Simply put, this control divides change management duties between a proposer and an approver.
Implementing maker-checker approvals in MDM (Mobile Device Management) environments reduces operational risk, improves accountability, and aligns device management with broader compliance practices.
What is a maker-checker control in MDM platforms?
A maker-checker control governs how configuration and policy changes are introduced into an environment. By introducing maker and checker roles, no individual can both define and deploy changes to manage devices without independent review.
Makers create and propose changes, including device policy, configuration profiles, and security settings. Checkers, on the other hand, review, validate, and approve proposed changes before they are deployed across an environment.
Why is dual control important for device policy approvals?
MDMs implement organization-wide controls, enabling immediate, centralized, and far-reaching enforcement. Below are examples of high-impact changes where maker-checker reviews are essential:
- Modifying device encryption settings: An incorrect encryption policy can render devices inaccessible, trigger data loss protection events, or violate compliance requirements.
- Adjusting app permissions: Deploying overly restrictive policies can break business-critical apps, while overly permissive policies can weaken an organization’s security posture.
- Changing network policies: Network misconfigurations can prevent remote access to critical systems, disconnect remote users, or route traffic outside secure paths.
- Altering enforcement rules: A minor misconfiguration can cause endpoints to drift out of compliance, resulting in potential fines and penalties.
In a nutshell, dual controls act as a checkpoint that slows down unchecked changes before they propagate across an environment. Without this control, each policy change can be applied without ample review, deployed unintentionally, and used maliciously by a compromised administrator account.
Applicability of maker-checker controls in MDM scenarios
In a managed environment, misconfigurations can lock users out, break apps, and weaken overall security posture. Broad business-critical actions, especially those that impact security, access, or automation, benefit from a maker-checker review before deployment.
Creating or modifying device configurations
Risky changes like encryption requirements or update policies can be instantly pushed to numerous devices through MDM platforms, making misconfigurations easy to scale. Maker-checker approvals workflows add a secondary verification step, helping ensure changes align with expected device behavior before they’re rolled out.
Changing enrollment rules or trust settings
Enrollment and trust controls determine allowable devices in an environment, and the controls that define them. A dual-control verification prevents mistakes that can block legitimate devices or allow the enrollment of untrusted endpoints.
Approving network or access exceptions
Policy exceptions can go stale over time, increasing risk. An independent review between makers and checkers ensures exceptions are justified, time-bound, and amply documented.
Adjusting automated actions or scheduled tasks
IT automation speeds up environment processes while preserving consistency, but it can also amplify risks. For instance, misconfigured scheduled reboots, policy enforcement timings, or scripted actions can cause unexpected behaviors. Independent reviews help confirm a change’s intent and scope before deployment.
Maintaining compliance through maker-checker controls
Separation of roles in review processes is a common requirement in compliance and audit frameworks. A dual control mechanism prevents unchecked authority over changes, especially in business-critical functions, improving accountability, auditability, and risk reduction.
Fosters clear accountability for change ownership
Maker-checker controls offer a visible trail showing who proposed and approved changes. This removes ambiguity, providing reviews with context-rich documentation around change ownership.
Provides documentation of MDM approval workflows
Dual controls generate approval records that serve as evidence that changes were reviewed sufficiently before enforcement. By maintaining an accurate evidence packet, admins can easily trace approval workflows across different changes in an environment.
Simplifies audit and review processes
Continuous documentation of approval and change history helps auditors verify control integrity and ascertain that controls operate as designed. This helps reduce the time spent on reconstructing changes and decisions during audits and reviews.
Prevents unilateral changes
Many compliance standards require controls that foster clear separation of duties (SoD), especially within the financial, banking, and IT security sectors. Clear separation of duties ensures that changes aren’t made by a single actor, but rather through meticulous, independent review between a requester and an approver.
Use tools to enforce maker-checker MDM controls consistently
In MDM environments, changes apply consistently and at scale, making misconfigurations through manual enforcement unreliable and costly. Through effective tooling implementation, you can support review and approval workflows more effectively using technical controls:
- Role-based access controls (RBAC): Defines who can propose and approve changes, preventing a single individual from deploying high-impact configurations across an environment.
- Notifications for pending reviews: Automated notifications ensure reviewers are aware of pending approvals, allowing them to complete reviews promptly.
- Request and approval logging: Detailed logs serve as an audit trail, providing insight into what was requested, approved, and applied.
Balancing control and efficiency through maker-checker approvals
Not every configuration change carries the same level of risk. Matching review intensity to a change’s potential impact helps teams protect critical controls without compromising day-to-day workflows.
Limit dual controls to high-impact changes
Changes affecting business-critical functionalities should undergo an independent review, while low-risk actions should route to a lighter approval workflow. A balanced approach between control and efficiency focuses reviews and allows routine operations to proceed efficiently.
Define low-risk emergency processes
Formulating break-glass procedures ensures teams can act quickly during an emergency without having to undergo stringent maker-checker approvals.
Setting clear approval expectations and timelines
Maker-checker controls work best when reviewers know what is expected of their roles. Providing approvers with definite response times and escalation paths prevents bottlenecks in your change approval process.
Documenting standards reduces future rework
A clear configuration and policy baseline serves as a strong basis for approvals, reducing back-and-forth during reviews. When expectations are documented, maker-checker processes become quick validation exercises that require little to no subsequent rework.
⚠️ Things to look out for
| Risks | Potential Consequences | Reversals |
| Requests not reviewed | Unreviewed approval requests can indefinitely stall change implementation, delaying necessary updates. | Verify that approval notifications reach their intended recipients and that each request has an assigned reviewer. |
| Frequent rejections | Consistent change rejections increase rework, slowing change cycles. Maker frustration can also lead to the creation of informal approval workflows outside the system. | Clarify configuration standards and approval criteria by providing examples of acceptable changes to reduce guesswork. |
| Approval conflicts | Reviewer disagreement can stall or indefinitely bounce requests between approvers, prolonging the approval process for high-impact changes. | Define clear escalation paths and establish a final approval authority, then capture who resolves conflicts and under what conditions conflicts are resolved. |
| Policy drift | Approval workflows, roles, or standards gradually become stale over time. | Conduct periodic reviews of existing maker-checker processes, and validate if they still align with current risk, team structure, and operational needs. |
Use NinjaOne to streamline maker-checker approval workflows
NinjaOne helps the central management of maker-checker controls through role-based access, expanded change visibility, and real-time alerts. Together, these features enable dual approval workflows, maintain clear audit trails, and ensure important changes are promptly reviewed.
- Role-based access controls: Assign maker and checker roles to your technicians to enable a dual-approval workflow, maintain clear role separation, and prevent role confusion.
- Audit logging: Capture tamper-resistant audit logs within approval workflows to get a clear picture of who proposed and approved changes in your environment.
- Real-time alerting: Set custom alerts for technicians with checker roles to keep them updated on pending reviews and prevent stalled changes.
Strengthen MDM governance with maker-checker controls
Independent reviews reduce risk, improve auditability, and increase trust in device management processes by preventing unilateral change approvals. Maker-checker processes strengthen MDM-based deployments by adding an extra validation step for high-impact changes that could potentially harm critical environment configurations.
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