Streamline Compliance with This Segregation of Duties Checklist

In today's complex business environment, ensuring proper controls and compliance is crucial. One critical aspect of maintaining an effective control environment is segregation of duties (SoD). The segregation of duties principle ensures that no single individual has complete control over an entire process or system, reducing the risk of fraud, errors, and misuse of resources. To help organizations implement and maintain a robust SoD framework, Strongpoint offers a comprehensive SoD checklist and powerful automation tools.

Let's explore how this checklist can streamline your compliance efforts. 

1. Clean up roles and permissions to avoid false positives 

Many SoD violations can be caused by unassigned or unused roles, global permissions that are no longer in use, and employees who have access to multiple roles that they don't utilize. These situations create unnecessary risks and generate false positives during SoD analysis. To address this issue, Strongpoint provides pre-built tools that can identify such gaps and help you clean them up efficiently. By removing unused roles and permissions, your team can reduce the noise in your compliance monitoring and focus on the real risks. 

2. Automate SoD analysis using the Strongpoint SoD rule library 

Once you've cleaned up your roles and permissions, it's time to conduct a comprehensive SoD analysis. Strongpoint's SoD rule library contains a proven set of common NetSuite segregation of duties risks. By leveraging this library, your team can automate the analysis process and generate a list of potential violations. The entire analysis typically takes no more than a few hours, allowing you to quickly identify areas that require attention. 

3. Analyze for SoD conflicts within roles 

While analyzing roles as a whole is important, it's equally crucial to examine conflicts within individual roles. This analysis helps identify instances where critical permissions are assigned and conflicting permissions exist within the same role. Strongpoint's tools can automatically identify roles that grant users excessive permissions, enabling them to perform multiple steps within a process. By addressing these conflicts, you can further enhance your control environment and minimize risks. 

4. Analyze for SoD conflicts at the user level 

In addition to role-level analysis, it's essential to assess user-level access issues. Strongpoint's tools focus on identifying employees with multiple roles and global permissions, providing a comprehensive view of SoD risks across your organization. By understanding the population of potential risks, you can take targeted actions to address and mitigate them effectively. 

5. Automatically analyze transactional activity by role and permission 

To take your SoD compliance efforts to the next level, Strongpoint offers a secret weapon: the ability to automatically analyze transactional activity. By understanding the actual usage of roles and permissions within your system, you can identify areas where access is not actively utilized. This knowledge allows you to scale back access to "view only" mode or remove unnecessary permissions, minimizing the potential for SoD violations without impacting end users. Additionally, you can implement compensating and mitigating controls to manage any conflicts that persist. 

6. Where SoD and mitigating controls aren't possible, enable Strongpoint Agent 

In situations where segregation of duties and traditional mitigating controls are not feasible, Strongpoint provides an alternative solution. By enabling the Strongpoint Agent, your team can automatically monitor and detect any suspicious or unauthorized activities. This additional layer of monitoring helps identify anomalies and potential risks, allowing you to intervene promptly and mitigate any adverse effects. 

Segregation of duties is a critical aspect of maintaining a strong control environment and ensuring compliance. With Strongpoint's comprehensive SOD checklist and powerful automation tools, you can streamline your SoD analysis and mitigate risks efficiently. By cleaning up roles and permissions, leveraging the SoD rule library, and analyzing conflicts at both the role and user levels, you can enhance your control environment and reduce the potential for fraud and errors. Automating transactional activity analysis and enabling the Strongpoint Agent provide additional layers of protection and ensure ongoing compliance. Embrace Strongpoint's SOD checklist and empower your organization to achieve robust segregation of duties.