Blog

Assessing Your App GRC Investments for Maximum ROI

Written by Kyle Benson | Feb 16, 2023 8:00:00 AM
The Top Considerations of Cost-Effective Compliance

The web of regulations and compliance mandates that govern your company’s applications can be. . .complicated. 

Perhaps your organization has recently undergone changes, leaving you unsure about permissions across multiple apps. Maybe recent headlines left you wondering if you have the right controls over users who handle sensitive transactions. Or maybe a recent merger muddied the water on appropriate access. Now, instead of sheep, you’re in bed counting potential Separation of Duties (SoD) violations. 

Your application ecosystem is integral to your organization’s success, but it also brings an equally critical burden of legal and security risks that you must govern to avoid financial fallout. Last year, 53% of all application hacks were due to unauthorized access from default, shared, or stolen credentials. Without an effective Application Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) solution, any one of your imagined late-night scenarios can lead to real-life fines and damages.

Is One Platform Enough To Stay Compliant And Secure? 

If your organization relies on more than one ERP or EHR application—and you’re not using Saviynt Application Access Governance (AAG)—the answer is no, one platform is not enough. And it’s going to require a hefty investment to close the gap. To ensure your step toward an effective Application GRC solution doesn’t become two steps back, there are a few points to consider.

The Trouble With Multiple Platforms 

Governing applications across your organization is complex; so the number one virtue of an effective solution is its ability to simplify. If you’re cobbling together multiple GRC platforms, productivity is going to take a hit. 

Implementation and Maintenance 

Each GRC system is as unique as a fingerprint, but not in a good way. Unique interfaces, policies, and workflows mean a uniquely painful investment in employee training. Anyone who has struggled to navigate and use multiple systems simultaneously knows that delays, errors, and inefficiencies can be par for the course. In addition, each system may require its own licensing, support, and maintenance fees — and these can add up. But you either pay for training, or end up paying down the road when productivity grinds to a halt.

Managing and maintaining multiple application GRC platforms also (and doing upgrades across all systems) requires additional server resources, storage, and bandwidth, which can increase IT infrastructure costs and may require additional staff.

Manual Errors and Resource Drain

The ability to integrate data across different application GRC platforms is essential to tracking and monitoring compliance between, for example, a customer relationship management (CRM) system and an ERP system. Seamless synchronization can help catch issues before they become problems, assist you with analytics and compliance reporting, and of course, become essential to delivering a seamless customer experience. However, multiple GRC platforms may not easily accommodate this, or may require time-consuming manual data entry into each platform.

Vendor Management 

The longer the list of GRC vendors, the more expensive and resource-intensive the contract management. Do the terms align with your organization’s needs? If a compliance issue arises, how many vendors will you need to work with to resolve the issue? If changes are needed, your team’s time and focus are going to be siphoned into monitoring service level agreements, tracking issues and resolutions, and conducting periodic reviews of vendor performance to ensure they’re meeting their obligations.

One Platform. All the Features. 

If this sounds like a lot of cost and clutter, you’re not wrong. From day one, Saviynt was built around the vision of a unified platform that can deliver all the capabilities of multiple identity tools. No matter your app governance pain points, our AAG solution brings a level of visibility, risk mitigation, and compliance that would normally require a far bigger investment to accomplish. Here’s why.

Savings. Moving to Saviynt Enterprise Identity Cloud (EIC) eliminates multiple platforms and decreases the hardware and maintenance costs associated with licensing and professional services, servers, and data center space. 

User Experience. Our unified interface means your teams only have to learn one technology—no redundant training and no toggling between different systems. All administration processes can happen in a modern and centralized management console that gets you up and running quickly.

Compliance. Regardless of how complex an application’s security architecture—and regardless of the technology vendor, Saviynt’s Control Exchange provides out-of-the-box SoD rulesets for all of the major applications, including SAP, Epic, Oracle EBS, Oracle Cloud, Workday, Microsoft Dynamics, PeopleSoft, and Infor — to name a few. You can customize these, import any existing SoD rulesets that you have, or create new ones from scratch.

Visibility. Other GRC solutions on the market only address a few applications at most — or only provide coarse-grained visibility across a few applications. Saviynt provides fine-grained visibility that goes deep into the security models of these applications, enabling you to identify SoD violations across multiple technologies, regardless of whether the user is privileged or a third party.

Saviynt’s SoD workbench is a single place where users can filter or search for specific SoD violations, apply mitigating controls, view violation details, and remove the unwanted entitlements causing the SoD violation. 

Automation. If you’re not clear on how a user’s role and access will impact your SoD risks, Saviynt replaces manual guesswork with real-time monitoring, access request and approval workflows, and role-based access controls. Automate access certification and remediation, policy enforcement, and risk assessments so you can stay on top of your GRC responsibilities, reduce the risk of data breaches, and avoid costly non-compliance fines.

10 Questions To Better Application Security 

When was the last time you gave your applications a check-up? Our ten-minute, 10-question Assessment Tool can show you how well your safeguards are performing, where you need to improve, and which features are most useful to your organization. 

No matter where you are on your journey, this quiz can clear away the confusion and provide a comprehensive view of your access governance needs.