Identity-Aware Proxy Quarterly Check-In Checklist

That’s how we knew it was time again for the Identity-Aware Proxy quarterly check-in. Fail that check, and you might not know until an attacker slips past your access rules. Pass it, and you buy three more months of sleep.

An Identity-Aware Proxy, or IAP, stands guard between your users and your apps. It decides who gets in based on identity, context, and policy. But policies drift. Teams change. Dependencies rot. Integrations break in silence. The quarterly check-in is the chance to catch these before they turn into outages or breaches.

The first step is to verify your identity sources. Audit your connection to identity providers. If you use multiple providers, test each one. Make sure login flows complete fast. Confirm multi-factor challenges work even when a device is offline.

Next, test your resource rules. Break them on purpose. Login as a known user without the right permissions. Try from an untrusted network. Confirm that the access is denied and events are logged. If your IAP allows temporary access, check the expiration works to the minute.

Third, scan your logs. Look for silent failures, repeated denials from allowed identities, expired tokens in use. These are often early warnings that your configuration is slipping out of sync.

Review integrations. Your IAP may be tied to CI/CD pipelines, monitoring tools, or secrets stores. Check the machine identities. Rotate keys. Remove old service accounts. These are frequent backdoors left open by mistake.

Finally, run a live failover. Switch IAP to a backup region or instance. Watch how DNS, routing, and certificates behave. Many organizations skip this. It’s the one test that will tell you whether you can actually stay online if your primary goes down.

Make this checklist short enough to run in under two hours. Automate where possible, but run it by hand once a quarter. Humans catch patterns scripts will miss.

When an attacker comes, they move fast. Your IAP must be faster. The quarterly check-in forces your defenses to stay sharp and your access controls to be more than a checkbox in a compliance report.

You can see an IAP check-in happen live, end-to-end, without setting up a single server. Spin it up in minutes with hoop.dev and watch every step from login to block to audit trail. The best time to harden your gateways is before you think you need to.