Explain how Venafi's role-based access control governs certificate requests and approvals?

Venafi's RBAC model layers identity, scope, and permission together so that who can do what is always evaluated against a specific part of the policy tree, not the system as a whole.

Users and service accounts are typically tied into an existing identity provider (Active Directory or another SAML/OIDC source) rather than maintained as a separate Venafi-only user list, so access follows the same onboarding and offboarding process the rest of the organization already relies on. Permissions — request, approve, revoke, read, manage policy — are then granted at a specific policy folder or zone, and because folders inherit from their parent, a permission granted higher in the tree cascades down unless a sub-folder explicitly restricts it.

The approval permission is what implements a maker-checker control: a folder configured to require approval means a request submitted by someone with only "request" rights sits pending until a separate user with "approve" rights signs off, and that whole exchange is logged, so an auditor can trace exactly who requested a certificate and who authorized it without relying on email threads or tickets as the system of record.