From stopping fraud, theft, and errors to preventing SOX compliance violations, SAP Segregation of Duties (SoD) plays a lead role in minimizing business risk. Organizations must continuously iterate their internal controls to ensure their SoD strategy is effective; however, we all know this is easier said than done.
A Segregation of Duties or SoD violation occurs when a user has more control over a particular workflow than needed. For example, if a user can both approve new vendors and release purchase orders, it creates a conflict of interest that could, potentially, lead to fraud. The primary goal of implementing SoD is to, first, prevent users from gaining authorizations that create conflict and, second, to detect existing user authorizations that are in violation of organisational policies and/or compliance regulations.
With existing capabilities, audit preparation and reporting are manually intensive processes that deliver an outdated snapshot of risk. Time and effort are wasted investigating immaterial events (i.e., false-positives, non-financial activity) because audit logs miss relevant details. Furthermore, manual analysis can be prone to errors, unscalable, and increasingly costly.
Due to resource-intensive audit processes, most organizations can only review a fraction of their SoD audit findings. This limited sample scope, typically between 3-8%, leaves the vast majority of risk unaddressed. While the sample may indicate control effectiveness, significant material risks may go undetected, and confidence will be curbed.
Existing SAP SoD audit logs will show transaction activity but lack the data-level granularity to identify and filter out false-positive SoD violations. Manual investigation and correlation must be performed to do this – adding overhead, slowing the reporting process, and making it more difficult to prove compliance.
The bottleneck stems from technology and dictates unscalable processes. One approach to overcome this challenge is to adopt data-centric logging, which provides relevant details beyond roles and transactions – enabling customers to automate the majority of manual investigation and correlation efforts. From here, organizations can shift their valuable human resources towards remedial activities to further reduce SoD risks.
Delivering data-centric logs paired with contextual information, Appsian360 provides visibility into SoD violations with far greater detail than what is possible with existing transaction-level audit logs. This additional information enables customers to eliminate false-positives automatically, view actual SoD violations, and prioritize events based on relevant details (e.g., dollar amount, time/location performed, etc.)
Leverage data-centric visibility to streamline SAP Segregation of Duties:
As the burden of SAP SoD compliance grows, organizations must look towards technology to help automate tedious manual processes and strengthen internal controls. At Pathlock, we’ve built our solutions with this need in mind, delivering a platform that enables SAP customers to do more with less. Contact us today for a demo, and let’s explore how we can help your organization streamline SAP segregation of duties.
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