Material Weakness Series Part 3: Ineffective Transaction Level Controls

In the previous article of this series, we talked about data field-level controls and how you can resolve a data field-level control weakness with security best practices. This article goes one level deeper from ERP data fields to ERP transactions. Sensitive transactions like approving payments, adding vendors, and modifying contracts have a direct impact on the business. Without the necessary transaction level controls, they could create red flags during an audit, leading to discovering a material weakness.

What Is A Transaction Level Control?

Transaction level controls are intended to detect and/or prevent errors, misappropriations, or policy non-compliance in a financial transaction process. Effective transaction-level controls help organizations achieve their mission and strategic objectives for a given business process transaction by appropriately mitigating inherent risks. Weak transaction controls could lead to fraud, mishandling of payments, or financial errors that eventually impact the company’s annual or interim financial statements.

How To Resolve Transaction Level Control Weaknesses

Resolving transaction level control weaknesses requires implementing specific solutions that enable you to create a security layer at the transaction level of your ERP application. A simple and direct method of achieving this is implementing Multi-factor Authentication (MFA) at the transaction level. While many organizations use MFA to secure ERP access, the authorization granted during login gives the user unlimited access to transactions related to the user’s role.

However, by deploying step-up MFA for sensitive transactions, you can re-authenticate identity and monitor and create an access log for these transactions. This also helps security teams flag suspicious transaction activity by the user, thereby adding a preventative and detective control at the transaction layer of your ERP application.

Implementing Transaction Control With Pathlock

Pathlock allows you to force MFA challenges at the transaction level to ensure Zero Trust, not just at the initial access but also deeper within your ERP applications. Pathlock also enables you to go beyond Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) security models to a dynamic security model like Attribute-Based Assess Control (ABAC). The platform considers a user’s contextual attributes like access location, time of the request, device type, etc., before establishing trust and granting access to data or transactions. Your security teams can use these dynamic user privileges to enforce multi-factor authentication for partial or full access to sensitive data and transactions 

Pathlock Platform natively integrates into your ERP web server without requiring customizations or additional servers. Security teams can use their existing MFA Vendors like Duo Security, Okta, SafeNet, Microsoft Authenticator, and more to force MFA challenges at the ERP transaction level.  

Schedule a demo with Pathlock ERP experts to understand how you can implement layered security controls inside your ERP applications to protect sensitive transactions.