Increased compliance regulations and the rising number of internal threats have forced organizations to tighten application access and adopt the principle of least privilege. However, when ERP applications like JD Edwards have thousands of users accessing them to perform their daily tasks, managing user access requests while adhering to compliance requirements can be challenging. The technical staff needs to put a considerable amount of time and effort into managing the provisioning process. And for auditors, providing audit reports showing appropriate approvals requires going through extensive paperwork. However, a majority of these problems can be solved through automated user provisioning. Here are three key areas where automation can significantly improve your JD Edwards provisioning process.
Traditionally, granting access to JD Edwards users has been a manual process, with emails moving back and forth between business owners and security/application admins. The large number of requests received by admins means there is little done in terms of manual checks. Essentially, the process is inefficient and allows risk to creep in due to overprovisioning. For auditors, this means going through volumes of paperwork to verify compliance and highlight risk.
However, automating your access provisioning process reduces much of the manual tasks, eliminates paperwork, and provides a streamlined process to grant access. An efficient provisioning solution allows you to tailor the workflow based on your company’s processes and hierarchy, with defined steps at each stage. Automation makes routine user and role administration and clean-up tasks faster. It also enables the setting up of a large number of users during implementation or acquisition projects.
One of the biggest fallouts of manual user provisioning is over-provisioning, which leads to data security threats and increases the risk of fraud. Granting users new roles without checking for conflicts can provide users with more access than necessary. This could lead to segregation of duties violations and audit failures resulting in hefty fines.
This challenge can easily be overcome by deploying an automated user provisioning solution that also does SoD checks before granting roles. This allows approvers and admins to immediately identify SoD conflicts and program the process flow to allow or deny role assignments. Another significant benefit of automation is that the entire process is documented, providing a complete audit trail as evidence for your auditors.
Documenting and logging all access requests is a critical requirement for audit and compliance. However, tracking access changes through paperwork and tables is a tedious process. Not only does it increase the burden on your internal audit teams, but it also allows violations to go unnoticed. Apart from this, manual processes make it challenging for auditors to dig out information and provide evidence to external auditors.
Automation enables you to log all provisioning activity with a date and time stamp, allowing you to see exactly who requested, approved, and assigned what and when. This provides evidence for auditors who are testing that role assignments are authorized appropriately. It also provides evidence for internal inquiries or escalations if incorrect roles are assigned or if people perceive that undue delays have occurred.
Pathlock’s User Admin Manager (UAM) is an automated user provisioning solution that provides a configurable workflow that automates the process of requesting, approving, and provisioning roles, reducing the workload and paperwork involved. In addition, it can prevent unintended SoD violations by checking for conflicts before roles are assigned and keeps a full audit trail as evidence for auditors.
Download the Pathlock User Admin Manager Data Sheet to learn how automation can simplify your JD Edwards EnterpriseOne user provisioning process and help you achieve better compliance.
Share