Developing a strategic Segregation of Duties matrix

Your people run your processes, and a workflow structure based on the segregation of incompatible duties is essential to keep everyone accurate and honest across departments. Let’s examine how SOD policies can help you manage risk in different areas of your organization. Segregation of duties is recommended across the enterprise, but it’s arguably most critical in accounting, cybersecurity, and information technology departments.

• You may have noticed instances where a lack of proper checks and balances leads to unauthorized access or financial discrepancies.
• In this case, a function-level or company-level SoD may be used, for example, to assess effectiveness of individual-level SoD.
• Profiles are related to roles, which means that from the perspective of applications and systems, a role can be thought of as a collection of user profiles.
• There is no need to include both steps in the analysis of the potentially incompatible duties.
• You’ll want to establish a formal process for managing exceptions to SoD policies, ensuring that deviations are documented, approved by management, and monitored with additional controls if necessary.
• Any organization handling sensitive information, financial transactions, or critical processes can benefit from implementing SoD.

Identity Security for Business Applications

This includes information on request approvals or rejections, license duration or tier changes, and comments added by any admin. This keeps users updated and aware of any changes or decisions made regarding their application access. In case an access request gets rejected, decision-makers can provide comments explaining the reasons for the rejection, ensuring transparency and clarity in the process. This guide will provide you with a clear understanding of SoD, its importance, and practical steps to implement it effectively in your organization, ensuring a more secure and efficient operation. Organizations can create SoD matrices by hand or with spreadsheet software, such as Excel. However, they are most commonly generated automatically using enterprise resource planning (ERP) software.

Embracing Identity and Access Management: A Comprehensive Guide to Implementation in the Workplace

Now that we’ve established the SoD implementation checklist, let’s delve into the best practices for effective separation of duties implementation. By implementing the following checklist for SoD implementation, your organization can not only enhance its security posture but also foster an environment of accountability, transparency, and adaptability. The software developer is not allowed to test software, push the code to production or make data backups.

Implementing Segregation of Duties: A Practical Experience Based on Best Practices

Processes as Scoping BoundariesA second boundary may be created by the processes that transform the assets or their status. Again, such boundaries must be assessed to determine if they introduce any residual risk. In some cases, segregation is effective even when some conflict is apparently in place. Fastpath, now part of Delinea, has been an industry leader for twenty years with an automated solution for reviewing segregation of duties.

• In the AUT activity, the department checks the PRF submitted by the requestor; in the REC and CUS duties, they send the PO to the supplier.
• According to the proposed step-by-step guidance, a simplified model of software development activities following a classic waterfall approach can be used, as shown in the matrix in figure 4.
• This translates to receiving up-to-the-minute data, valuable insights, and intelligent AI-driven alerts to keep you well-informed.
• However, this is risky since the employee has the possibility to create a fake supplier (using for example his/her own bank account number), creating a fake invoice and paying it.
• In the financial department, the application of segregation of duties becomes a cornerstone in safeguarding against fraud and financial irregularities.
• This dramatically reduces the risk of fraud—for example, by preventing individuals making illicit orders and then failing to report the transactions, or reporting them with the wrong value.
• To assess incompatible duties, it is useful to set up a matrix highlighting possible conflicts (figure 3).

Best Practices for Implementing Segregation of Duties.

Ensuring the security and integrity of sensitive data and critical systems is paramount. SoD refers to the practice of dividing responsibilities and tasks among different individuals within an organization to prevent conflicts of interest and unauthorized access. Accurate and reliable financial reporting is crucial to maintain regulatory compliance, gain investor trust, and make informed business decisions. SoD plays a critical sod matrix role in ensuring the integrity of financial reporting processes. By separating financial responsibilities, your team reduces the risk of intentional or unintentional errors that could impact financial statements. Fastpath’s Identity Governance Administration (IGA) solution checks for segregation of duties conflicts during the automated provisioning process.

Think of them as the digital footprints that trace every action taken within the matrix. These tools provide a comprehensive overview of the process flow by recording who did what, when, and where. This article will discuss the essential components of the SoD matrix template that will act as a roadmap, outlining who has access to what within your organization. These reports are invaluable for internal audits and regulatory compliance assessments.

It is not necessary to describe all the activities and loops in the subprocess as long as no new duty is highlighted. For example, in figure 1, both “Draft, share and update purchasing plans” and “Submit plans to board” are REC duties performed by the same actor, on the same asset. There is no need to include both steps in the analysis of the potentially incompatible duties.

Even trusted employees may mistakenly perform incorrect transactions, or their credentials may be compromised and provide bad actors with a privileged account to gain access to critical applications. The basis of SoD is the understanding that running a business should not be a single-person job. No one person should have the power or control to perform any kind of task that may lead to fraudulent or criminal activity that could damage the company. SoD is an important element of both enterprise risk management and compliance with laws such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX).

Step Segregation of Duties Checklist

In fact, checking SoD among all actors against all activities in a complex enterprise, aside from being impractical, would be meaningless. The SoD matrix itself is a highly confidential document that only certain people should be able to access or edit. For example, the manage purchasing plans subprocess might be described by a diagram using BPMN notation, similar to the one in figure 1.

An SoD violation occurs when an employee abuses their role and access — usually deliberately — to perform a prohibited action. The prohibition may be in place due to internal company policy or an external industry regulation. A violation typically occurs when the user has or gains control over more process steps than they are allowed and then misuses that access for their own benefit. When an individual can potentially act in their own interest and against the company’s interests, it can result in an SoD conflict. This simply means that they have multiple roles in a process, which allows them to perform a combination of important activities that could potentially harm the integrity of the process and, ultimately, the organization. Moreover, smaller organizations may find it more difficult to accomplish the segregation of duties because there are fewer people available to take on different parts of a task.