How Often Should You Perform PeopleSoft User Access Reviews And Why

PeopleSoft teams often face threats caused by excess privilege, malicious insiders, and access misuse. Most of these can be mitigated with internal policies and periodic user access reviews. These reviews are critical when PeopleSoft users transition to new roles, employees offboard, or new people join the organization and are assigned specific roles. Often, the previous roles in the system remain intact, and these unused roles, access, and authorizations may potentially result in security and business risks. Companies are realizing the importance of PeopleSoft user access reviews to prevent such threats and are deploying automated solutions.

How Often Do You Need User Access Reviews In PeopleSoft?

When it comes to user access and roles, PeopleSoft applications often fail to eliminate inactive accounts of employees who have been transferred to different roles or left the organization. Periodic reviews help identify redundant access and authorizations that could otherwise lead to exposed vulnerabilities. Let’s take a look at different scenarios that determine the importance of routine user access reviews:

Annual reviews:

The most common practice is to conduct a company-wide access review only once a year as it is time and resource-intensive. These reviews confirm that an organization has adequate controls to prevent unauthorized access to critical PeopleSoft data and transactions.

Bi-annual reviews:

These user access reviews are typically for compliance purposes. These are an integral part of successful access governance and implementing the principle of least privilege. During these reviews, multiple audit policies and rules are evaluated that could lead to compliance violations in PeopleSoft applications.

Quarterly reviews:

These are typically meant for IT-based roles and permissions. Quarterly reviews may include but are not always limited to:

• Understanding access-level activities
• Validating policies and generating policies based on access activity
• Monitoring activity trails

Monthly reviews:

If your organization has solutions deployed to detect access-related risks (e.g., SoD violations, sensitive access, etc.), it is recommended to perform monthly user access reviews where critical risks are identified. This helps strengthen internal controls and prevents role conflicts.

Year-round reviews:

While working with global teams, you may perform PeopleSoft user access reviews at different times of the year based on the geographical location.

6 Benefits Of Regular PeopleSoft User Access Reviews

Organizations leveraging the right set of automated solutions can perform these reviews regularly and reap the following benefits:

1. SoD Conflict Elimination:

Granting unnecessary access is one of the leading causes of SoD conflicts in PeopleSoft and puts your organization at risk for potential fraud. Frequent user access reviews help strengthen SoD controls, and multiple security tests ensure there are no conflicts.

2. Improving Data Security:

Frequent user access reviews in PeopleSoft, combined with periodic role clean-ups, allow or restrict actions such as report and query exports based on the context of user access.

3. Strengthen Data Privacy Measures:

Routine access reviews alongside adopting Attribute-Based Access Controls (ABAC) can enable automation of policy enforcement into access controls and prevent violation of policy requirements.

4. Prevents Privileged Access Abuse:

Periodic reviews help track all the user access data points to identify off-peak access, unknown IP address access, and access from unknown locations. This helps prevent privileged access misuse in PeopleSoft.

5. Enables Audit-Readiness:

Routine user access reviews can help streamline access request workflows, mitigate access risks, capture a complete audit trail of access requests and approvals in advance, and make your teams audit-ready.

6. Reduces Manual Effort & Complexity:

Automating role and access reviews eliminate the need for manual reporting and investigation of false positives. This further helps with automated analysis across multiple platforms.

How Pathlock Helps PeopleSoft Customers With User Access Reviews

Pathlock’s automated solution helps PeopleSoft customers significantly reduce the time taken for user access reviews. Here’s how we help them improve efficiency while improving data security and privacy:

Behavioral Profiling: Pathlock learns and displays the actual usage of all roles, helping managers determine the necessity of each role and user access. This helps analyze unused roles and user access and detect deviations indicating potential fraud in real-time.

Cost Optimization: Automating the PeopleSoft user access review and certification process reduces overhead costs and human error risks.

Audit-Readiness: Pathlock enables customers to meet auditor requirements with well-documented control processes. By reducing manual work, we help internal auditors to focus on more high-risk authorization access and other security risks.

Schedule a demo with our experts to make your user access reviews more efficient.