Separation of Duties: What it means for your business and how Saviynt can help

While we work closely with enterprises across various industries, a common challenge crops up time and again: How to effectively handle Separation of Duties (SOD) within our organization. Whether it’s the finance team trying to ensure no one has excessive access to both approving and processing transactions, or IT departments seeking to avoid conflicting permissions, the risk of violations and fraud is a constant concern. These discussions often lead to the same question – “What exactly does SOD entail and how can it be implemented effectively?”  

Understanding Separation of Duties 

SOD is one of the core principles of internal controls for regulatory compliance. The concept is simple: No one person should have control over multiple critical aspects of a process to avoid conflicts of interest. SODs help prevent the risk of fraud and errors, and should be adopted by all organizations. SOD establishes checks and balances that make it difficult for malicious activities to take place, ensuring accountability and reducing opportunities for fraud. This is especially important where access privileges and permissions can lead to significant financial, operational, or​​​​ reputational damage.   

Let’s take an employee in the finance department of an organization who has access to create and approve invoices. This combination of duties is a significant risk as the individual can create ​and ​approve an invoice, ​presenting a​ huge opportunity for fraud - where false invoices can be processed, causing a huge impact to the organization. 

Similarly, in IT, if someone has permissions to submit requests to create user accounts and approve access to sensitive data, there is a huge risk of misuse of unauthorized accounts with access to critical information. 

In both examples, the conflicting functions assigned to a single individual create an unnecessary risk that could be mitigated by separating or segregating these duties. This is where SOD comes into play, ensuring no individual can handle both critical tasks together in order to prevent errors and fraud. 

Preventing Single and Cross-Application SOD Violations 

Saviynt is the leading platform in identity and access management with Application Access Governance (AAG) capabilities that help manage SOD risks. Saviynt helps automate the detection and remediation of SOD violations, providing end to end visibility over critical functions and entitlements assigned to human and service accounts alike. Fine-grained integrations and predefined out-of-the-box rulesets for various enterprise applications like SAP, Oracle, MS D365, Workday, and other ERP systems help secure access. Organizations can customize the rules specific to their business processes and requirements. 

Cross-application SOD management is crucial in today’s interconnected business environments to prevent security risks across multiple systems, ensuring there aren’t conflicting permissions across applications. This approach helps maintain regulatory compliance and provides visibility and control over access rights.  

Saviynt’s SOD framework allows for preventative and detective risk analysis. As users’ access levels change, continuous monitoring can be enabled by scheduling jobs to evaluate and identify potential SOD violations due to conflicting access. The access request system (ARS) is integrated with SOD analysis when a user is submitting a request, flagging potential violations which can occur when the requested access is granted. 

Saviynt’s SOD workbench has multiple filters that can be used by security teams and auditors for a comprehensive view of violations. These views provide in-depth insights into the overall risk landscape, making it easier to manage and mitigate any issues. Saviynt Intelligence also plays a key role by seamlessly integrating with applications to provide insights on critical function violations. 

Here, an administrator is reviewing open SOD violations in Saviynt’s Identity Cloud. 

Saviynt provides consistent policy enforcement. Let us consider a large bank using Saviynt to manage access to its critical financial systems. The bank defines an SOD rule/policy to say no employee should be able to approve a loan application and issue funds. When a new employee in the loan department is granted access to process loan applications, Saviynt can automatically flag the risk if that individual also requests access to issue funds through preventative features. Configured workflows either reject the request or route it for additional approval to make sure the risk is addressed and mitigated. An existing employee who has conflicting, but previously unknown, access can be flagged through detective capabilities. Such risks can be managed and mitigated by SOD administrators or security teams by applying mitigating controls or revoking the access through various remediation options.  

SOD is not only best practice but also fundamental for managing risk in today’s complex technology environments. Without SODs, enterprises can be vulnerable to fraud, errors and compliance failures. Saviynt can help organizations minimize these risks and improve security postures. Whether you are in finance, healthcare, IT, Oil and Gas or consumer goods, Saviynt provides just the tools needed to secure your applications. 

Key SoD Features Provided by Saviynt’s Identity Cloud 

• OOTB integrations with enterprise and line of business applications (SAP, Oracle, Salesforce, Workfront, etc.) 
• Detective and Preventative Risk Analysis 
• Cross-application risk analysis and management 
• SOD workbench 
• Violation insights 

Please reach out to us if you have any concerns about SOD management or would like to learn more.