Security within any business is a prime consideration. Knowing who has access to what information at any given time will allow a company to minimise risk, improve security protocols, and access information about employees and customers. Who is able to approve high dollar purchases? Who can view information about employees, including social security information and payment history? Who is able to update the information related to partner companies and clients? All of this information falls under specific laws that require that certain precautions are taken with sensitive information. Additionally, companies want to protect themselves from potential issues related to the errant access of information.
SAP Security
SAP technology incorporates tight security that allows a company to set certain permissions for users based on a variety of outlined access levels. The program has three main objectives: confidentiality, integrity, and availability.
- Confidentiality – Helps to prevent users from viewing confidential information and potentially disclosing it.
- Integrity – Helps to ensure that the information is and remains accurate within the system in order to reduce errors.
- Availability – Helps to prevent potential loss or damage to the information systems within the company. This helps to protect against both accidental and deliberate damage.
The SAP system is designed to protect a company from a variety of different intrusions. Both business espionage and political factors can be a motivating reasons for individuals to want to gain access to the information stored by a company, but certainly are not some of the more prominent reasons that businesses should look to protect their information. Generally, curious individuals or individuals accidentally accessing the information tend to be more realistic security breaches that companies see with regularity, which can still be quite damaging to a company if that information is disclosed.
If a business is collecting very sensitive or important data, there needs to be some safeguards in place in order to ensure that nothing negative comes as a result of that storage. Companies need to devise policies that require certain levels of security clearances to access different levels of information, which is exactly what the SAP system provides.
When using the SAP system, it is of the utmost importance that special attention is paid to the segregation of duties. Giving individuals with specific duties excessive access to your databases could potentially put a company into legal trouble. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act dictates that employees need to have their duties segregated in order to ensure that risk is mitigated by the company to the best of its ability. For instance, giving an individual access to master vender records and also the ability to process accounts payable could potentially result in that individual falsifying records and generating fraudulent payments to a specific vendor. This is, of course, a serious conflict that could result in very serious problems.
The SAP system provides a great outline for the security of businesses, allowing them to ensure that they only provide the necessary access to specific information, providing a workflow for all databases and access levels within a company’s ranks. The system itself has simplified the process for hundreds of thousands of companies around the world and continues to be the most highly regarded security workflow in existence today.