Network Defense Essentials (NDE) Practice Exam 2025 - Free Network Defense Practice Questions and Study Guide

The component of access management responsible for tracking user actions on a network is accounting. Accounting involves the monitoring and logging of user activities and behaviors within a system. This process collects data on what actions users take, such as login times, accessed resources, and changes made to data. By maintaining detailed records of these activities, accounting helps organizations maintain security and compliance, as well as assists in auditing and forensic investigations when necessary.

Understanding accounting is crucial for recognizing which users performed specific actions and when these actions occurred. It provides an essential layer of oversight regarding how and when a network is used, enabling administrators to detect unauthorized use or anomalies in user behavior. This is different from other components such as authentication, which verifies a user's identity before granting access, and authorization, which determines what resources a user can access after they have been authenticated. Access control, on the other hand, refers to the overall policies and methods that restrict or grant access to data and resources in a network, but it does not specifically track actions.