Mobility & security: How to keep Your business safe anywhere and everywhere
How do increasing mobility, cloud-based applications, and remote workers affect your business’s need for internal security and audit management?
Whether your business is SOX-compliant or not, internal security controls and audits have always been an important part of healthy financial management. For many organizations, this has traditionally meant sizeable investments of time and money in IT-related tasks to install and maintain user controls or conduct audits.
What are the security risks of a mobile workforce?
When it comes to cybersecurity threats, running business applications in the cloud doesn’t inherently introduce more external security concerns. In fact, when it comes to external threats the cloud can be more secure than traditional on-premise systems.
However, cloud-based systems often allow increased mobile access and enable businesses to rely more on remote work. Having a dispersed workforce might make it more difficult to identify red flag behaviors for employees and can increase risk for internal security problems, critical errors and potential for fraud.
This means business of all kinds – whether you’re SOX-compliant or not – should pay careful attention to internal security controls.
What tools and tactics can reduce these risks?
1. Control user roles
Make sure your users aren’t all working as system administrators. Restrict access to what they can see and change based on what’s actually necessary for their job tasks.
Security controls should be simple to set up, both on the user level and at the level of individual fields and forms. You should also make it easy for users themselves to limit edits to forms and fields. This reduces the chance of accidental changes from others as well as the risk of intentional fraud.
2. Monitor access
Make sure you know right away if users are making changes that don’t make sense for their jobs. Set triggers to capture changes made to fields in real time and notify an administrator immediately.
Use audits and segregation of duties (SoD) checks to be sure nothing is being changed when it shouldn’t be. Regularly run SoD violation checks to figure out if any users have stepped outside their roles and broken rules.
3. Get a third-party advisor
One thing remains unchanged from the days of on-premise systems – businesses often have internal blind spots that allow employees to take advantage of the organization. That’s part of why having a security partner is key to gaining some perspective and ensuring your systems and employees are safe.
Learn more about audit and security management from Arbela
Arbela’s Audit and Security Manager is a comprehensive solution to fully meet your auditing and security needs for Microsoft Dynamics 365/AX. We’ll work with your business as a full-service partner to implement fraud prevention, SOX compliance reporting, audit preparation, and other functionality in order to provide a long-term, cost-effective solution for your systems security.
Enjoy the advantages of a mobile, cloud-based business without worrying about additional security risks – contact Arbela today to talk to a technology expert about how we can help.