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How Often Should You Perform PeopleSoft User Access Reviews And Why

By Esha Panda • May 27, 2022

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 User Access Reviews In PeopleSoft

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 Appsian Helps PeopleSoft Customers With User Access Reviews  

Appsian’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: Appsian learns and displays 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 significantly reduces overhead costs and human error risks.

Audit-Readiness: Appsian 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.

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7 Benefits Of Automating User Access Reviews In PeopleSoft

By Esha Panda • May 6, 2022

When PeopleSoft users transition to different roles or offboard, their previous roles and accounts in the system often remain intact. These unused roles and authorizations could potentially lead to business and security risks (e.g., compromised credentials). Role clean-ups and user access reviews in PeopleSoft play a significant role in preventing data security threats and Segregation of Duty (SoD) violations. This prepares organizations to adopt automation solutions that can assess risks and violations based on current authorizations and the actual usage of a particular role or account in PeopleSoft applications. 

Challenges With User Access & Roles In PeopleSoft

Traditional PeopleSoft application capabilities do not produce the required level of granularity and visibility into how users access and engage with data. When it comes to reviewing user access and roles, PeopleSoft applications often fail to purge inactive accounts of employees who have offboarded or shifted to a different role or account. These redundant accounts often lead to exposed vulnerabilities and pose a threat to data security. 

Companies need automated solutions to conduct periodic user access reviews in PeopleSoft that confirm the presence of adequate controls to restrict access to sensitive transactions and data. 

7 Key Benefits Of Automating PeopleSoft User Access Reviews

PeopleSoft user access reviews are often labor-intensive and prone to human errors due to the vast amount of data that needs to be manually examined. Automating the access review process offers the following benefits to organizations:

1. SoD Conflict Elimination:
Granting more access than a user needs to save time is one of the leading causes of SoD conflicts in PeopleSoft and puts the organization at risk for potential fraud. Automating user access reviews helps strengthen SoD controls, and multiple security tests ensure there are no conflicts.

2. Improving Data Security Without Limiting Productivity:
Introducing “context” to user access determines “who” is authorized to access “what” PeopleSoft data, “when,” from which device, and “why.” User access reviews 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:
Traditional Role-Based Access Controls (RBAC) usually limit your ability to restrict user access to sensitive data fields and transactions. Companies adopting Attribute-Based Access Controls (ABAC) can enable automation of policy enforcement into their access controls and prevent violation of policy requirements. 

4. Prevents Privileged Access Misuse:
Automating user access reviews for privileged accounts helps track all the user access data points to identify off-peak access, unknown IP address access, and access from strange locations. Enhanced access controls with dynamic authorization policies help prevent privileged access misuse in PeopleSoft.

5. Enables Audit-Readiness:
Organizations with automated user access reviews can streamline access request workflows, mitigate access risks, and capture a complete audit trail of access requests and approvals. This helps generate audit-ready reports for review by internal and external auditors with the least manual effort.

6. Reduced 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.

7. Emergency Access:
With automated reviews, organizations can further automate the release of access rights for emergency (firefighter) access, limiting the scope for a specific task, and revoking user access after custom-defined time frames.

How Appsian Helps PeopleSoft Customers Automate User Access Reviews

Appsian’s automated solution helps PeopleSoft customers reduce the time taken for user access reviews from months to hours. Here’s how we help them improve efficiency while bolstering data security and privacy:

  • Behavioral Profiling: Appsian learns and displays 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 PeopleSoft user access review and certification process significantly reduce overhead costs and human error risks. Teams can simply manage these processes via a simple web browser without involving an expert. 
  • Audit-Readiness: Appsian enables customers to meet auditor requirements with well-documented control processes. By reducing manual work to near zero, our solution allows internal auditors to focus on more high-risk authorization access and other potential security risks.
  • Intelligent Automation: This helps detect SoD conflicts, sensitive access, and potential policy violations for existing PeopleSoft users through business-oriented rules mapped to specific applications’ authorization models. 

Schedule a demo with our experts to make your user access reviews a seamless process. 

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8 Critical Success Factors For Achieving Audit-Readiness In PeopleSoft

By Esha Panda • May 2, 2022

Maintaining a state of audit readiness has become more critical than ever for organizations using PeopleSoft and other ERP systems in general. Today’s complex business environments, combined with the constantly increasing number of compliance regulations, require the audit to be dynamic, adaptable, and insightful to meet changing needs and expectations of investors, consumers, and regulators.

Unfortunately, what’s missing for most organizations is the lack of effective internal controls and policies that leads to compliance loopholes exposed during audits. So, before a deep dive into the success factors that prepare PeopleSoft teams for audits, let’s take a look at the basics.

What Is An Audit? What Makes PeopleSoft Teams Audit-Ready?

An audit is an official examination by a third party (independent auditor) to verify an organization’s adherence to reporting requirements (e.g., financial, operational, compliance, security, etc.). This verification is achieved by an auditor’s opinion on whether the entity’s reports are accurate and reliable. Typically, publicly traded companies, contractors to federal or state agencies, companies requiring bonds or insurance, private companies, and entities receiving government funding (e.g., universities, federal, state, and government agencies) undergo audits.

PeopleSoft teams should always log and monitor user activities to identify key risk indicators that could potentially lead to fraud. Establishing that your existing capabilities, internal controls, and policies are effective is the most significant step toward being audit-ready.

PeopleSoft Logging & Monitoring Are A Barrier To Audit-Readiness

When it comes to audits, PeopleSoft teams face certain challenges that make them unprepared for audits –

  • User activity information crucial to mitigating user-centric threats is often missing
  • Incident response for PeopleSoft is labor-intensive and time-consuming
  • Incomplete audit trail of application-level user activity
  • Auditing access and update activity require customization

Often, this brings to light some of the internal control deficiencies the organization being audited is grappling with, such as –

  • Ineffective Access Controls
  • Ineffective Data Field Level Controls
  • Ineffective Transaction Controls

The results produced by your business units, internal auditors, and external auditors will officially conclude if your internal controls and policies are effectively mitigating risks.

8 Key Factors To Set You Up For A Successful PeopleSoft Audit

PeopleSoft teams always need internal controls to effectively mitigate significant IT risks relevant to financial reporting in and around business systems. Listed below are some of the key success factors that help organizations minimize financial risks in terms of systems, transactions, and data.

  1. Companies implementing ABAC can enable automation of policy enforcement into their access controls and prevent violation of policy requirements.
  2. A risk-based approach to identifying and classifying PeopleSoft data helps improve regulatory compliance and reduces costs by eliminating unnecessary control measures.
  3. An effective regulatory change management process helps PeopleSoft teams keep pace with new regulations and avoid ineffective policies and internal controls that lead to excessive compliance costs.
  4. Your company should be able to monitor authorization usage and user activity in PeopleSoft to detect SoD violations in real-time.
  5. An effective vulnerability detection and remediation program helps organizations understand security weaknesses, assess risk exposure, and implement policies and controls to reduce the possibilities of a breach.
  6. Deploying a Common Control Framework across all applications minimizes the need for ineffective and manual controls that result in increased audit, risk, and compliance costs in PeopleSoft.
  7. Implementing step-up MFA for sensitive PeopleSoft transactions adds preventative and detective controls at the transaction level. This helps security teams flag suspicious transaction activities by users and improve audit readiness.
  8. To comply with regulatory and audit requirements, organizations need to understand their residual risk levels (residual risk = inherent risk – control effectiveness). Continuously monitoring these risk levels ensures the operating effectiveness of their internal controls and helps mitigate overall risk.

Ace Your Audits With Appsian’s PeopleSoft Capabilities

An investment in additional PeopleSoft capabilities such as logging, monitoring, and policy enforcement, among others, is an opportunity to improve your audit readiness. With the Appsian Security Platform, you can implement, verify, and maintain effective controls to achieve your annual financial statement and compliance audit requirements in a more cost-effective manner with the following features –

  • Adaptive Attribute-Based Access Controls to enable the enforcement of policy requirements into the access controls at the transaction and data level.
  • Multi-Factor Authentication at the login, transaction, and data field levels to minimize risk exposure.
  • Layered security, also known as defense-in-depth, protects against threats while incorporating compensating controls in the event of a control failure.
  • Periodic Control Assessments to validate the effectiveness of existing controls.
  • Continuous User Behavior Analysis to detect and report anomalies and threats.

Schedule a demo with our PeopleSoft experts to understand how you can implement effective controls and policies to stay audit-ready.

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3 Major Benefits of Implementing Automated User Provisioning For JD Edwards 

By Shiv Sujir • April 29, 2022

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.

Streamlines User Provisioning With Configurable Workflows

Traditionally, granting access to JD Edwards users has been a manual process, with emails moving back and for 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.

Performs Segregation of Duties Checks Before Role Assignment

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.

Maintains a Detailed Audit Trail Of The Entire Process

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.

Automated User Provisioning With Appsian

Appsian’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 Appsian User Admin Manager Data Sheet to learn how automation can simplify your JD Edwards EnterpriseOne user provisioning process and help you achieve better compliance.

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How to Simplify Your JD Edwards Access Reviews

By Shiv Sujir • April 22, 2022

What is a Periodic Access Review?

Access review or recertification is an IT General Control procedure that involves auditing all user access roles, privileges, and combinations of roles to determine if they are correct and adhere to the organization’s internal policies and compliance regulations. Most organizations only perform this audit of user access once a year, although some may review their high privileged user accounts more frequently. From a compliance point of view, it is critical for organizations to provide JD Edwards users with the least amount of access required to perform their tasks and that existing roles do not create conflicts that could lead to fraud or financial misinformation. This makes access reviews a key activity to mitigate risk, prevent fraud, and meet compliance.

Why JD Edwards Access Reviews Are Important

Most business applications have a role-based access control (RBAC) security model to assign roles and authorizations. However, JD Edwards user roles pose a specific problem when it comes to access reviews. Within JD Edwards (JDE), multiple roles assigned to a single user can be viewed in the “sequence manager.” But there is a known issue associated with this.

The permissions of roles higher in the sequence will take priority over the permission of roles lower in the sequence. Unfortunately, this means JD Edwards customers can end up with unexpected access results when granting multiple JDE roles to a user. This is one of the many RBAC issues that necessitate a third-party security solution to assist in managing this type of “inherited permission risk.”

The assignment of multiple roles in any business application requires thorough testing to effectively manage the inherited permission risks. Unfortunately, most business applications, including JD Edwards, lack effective access testing across multiple roles. Periodic access reviews help identify such roles and provide business managers with the necessary information to de-provision or segregate users to mitigate risk and prevent fraud.

Simplify JD Edwards Access Reviews with Automation

While most organizations conduct access reviews at least once a year, it is usually a time-consuming manual process where security and compliance teams have to constantly initiate the process and continuously follow up with the business manager to fill in their review sheets. At the end of the review, business managers have to wade through volumes of unintelligible data and try to get any meaningful information to sign it off. 

However, an automated access review solution can take away a majority of the manual work required to administer the reviews and provide data in organized reports that are easy to comprehend and draw insights from. Some of the benefits of deploying an automated review solution include:

Easy to Execute: Automation simplifies and accelerates the review process and provides accurate, intelligible information. Once you identify the business owners who are responsible for carrying out the reviews and set them up as approvers, they can be automatically notified when a review has been initiated, and they will be required to review all the items that affect their role(s).

Maintains Audit Trail: JD Edwards users can accept or reject the changes and provide an explanation for their decision within the review tool. This ensures that a complete audit trail is maintained, showing who approved/rejected what and when. Users can also use filters to check which reviews are pending and complete them on time.

Reports to Satisfy Auditors: Instead of maintaining data on spreadsheets, making it extremely difficult for internal and external auditors to check for compliance violations, an automated solution shows complete information, including current and previous values and who approved them. This helps you quickly access the required information and provide answers to external auditors.

Automate Your Access Review with Appsian

Appsian helps organizations consolidate the access review process for all their business systems into one centralized point. This ensures consistent performance across all business applications to increase efficiency and lower your costs. Appsian’s automated access review solution enables you to produce review reports with the touch of a button and present business managers with clear information that they can easily understand and review. The solution also captures data on approvals, rejections, and explanatory notes directly into your JD Edwards system, allowing you to quickly and easily produce evidence for your auditors whenever needed.

Download the Appsian Periodic Access Review Data Sheet to learn how you can save time, effort, and cost by automating your JD Edwards user access reviews.

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3 Key Steps To Prevent Fraud In Your JD Edwards EnterpriseOne

By Shiv Sujir • April 13, 2022

When you have a few hundred or maybe thousands of users logging into your JD Edwards EnterpriseOne applications – many of them handling critical financial data and transactions – fraud prevention measures are necessary. Here are three key steps you can implement to identify and prevent fraud in your JD Edwards EnterpriseOne applications.

Step 1: Identify The Gaps In Your JD Edwards Security

Securing your JD Edwards EnterpriseOne applications can be complex, especially since there are multiple routes by which users can access these applications. To prevent fraud and enhance security, you need to know what exactly users can access and the authorizations they possess.

So, the first step is to gain a complete view of all the users, the roles assigned to each user, the authorizations associated with individual roles, and how these authorizations are being used. Analyzing this information enables you to identify vulnerabilities created, overprovisioning, access risks, and compliance gaps.

Step 2: Implement And Maintain Segregation Of Duties (SoD)

Once you have a complete view of access and authorizations, the next step in preventing fraud is to have a detailed SoD policy in place. Segregation of Duties allows you to break down your workflow and implement checks at critical stages to prevent fraud. It decentralizes the power of approvals to ensure authorizations cannot be misused with malicious intent or for personal gain.

Once SoD has been implemented within your JD Edwards EnterpriseOne environment, running regular audit reports to identify users with access rights that violate your SoD policy is a crucial step. Since user roles keep changing over time, regular SoD audits enable you to maintain compliance. Where SoD conflicts are found, your internal audit team has to drill down to investigate and remediate the issues or, if appropriate, apply fully documented mitigating controls.

Step 3: Ensure That Your Reporting Is Current And Accurate

Reporting is an important part of any audit. Reports enable you to analyze data, gain insights, monitor progress, and provide evidence. However, using spreadsheets and manual checks is cumbersome and time-consuming. In addition, spreadsheets are notoriously prone to error, making them unreliable. Also, any changes made within spreadsheets can’t be audited.

An effective reporting tool enables you to slice and dice results for easier analysis, prioritization, and remediation. It also records changes in real-time and takes into account any SoD mitigations, thereby avoiding false positives. Lastly, detailed reports provide auditors with the evidence they need to prove compliance.

JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Fraud Prevention With Appsian

Segregation of Duties (SoD) controls are an important tool to prevent fraudulent activity or satisfy auditors’ demands. Unfortunately, JD Edwards EnterpriseOne contains no native functionality to help manage SoD or facilitate compliance reporting.

Appsian’s Audit Manager enables you to maintain an SoD model within the JD Edwards EnterpriseOne environment and runs regular checks to identify users with access permissions that might violate your SoD policy. It provides the ability to drill down to investigate any SoD conflict issue and remediate it with accurate information or, if appropriate, apply fully documented mitigating controls.

Download the Appsian Audit Manager datasheet to learn how you can control key fraud risks within your JD Edwards EnterpriseOne environment.

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How to Detect PeopleSoft Security Threats with Real-Time Analytics

By Michael Cunningham • April 12, 2022

PeopleSoft applications process and store vast amounts of customer, employee, and financial data that are constantly accessed by an increasing number of users from various locations, devices, and network connections. These dynamic access requirements make detecting PeopleSoft security threats a significant challenge. Unfortunately, PeopleSoft has static security controls and manual reporting, creating blind spots that result in security and compliance gaps.

In this Appsian solution demo, you’ll learn how to detect PeopleSoft security threats such as brute force attacks and logins from multiple IP addresses with Real-Time Analytics.

 


An inconvenient truth is that PeopleSoft logging capabilities are inadequate for meeting today’s dynamic security requirements. Appsian uses an in-depth understanding of PeopleSoft logging to capture granular, real-time information on who a user is, what they’re trying to access, and where they’re coming from.

Appsian’s real-time analytics platform, Appsian360, correlates and translates this unstructured log activity into actionable information. Equipping you with real-time visualized dashboards to quickly spot PeopleSoft security threats and other suspicious activity and drill down to root out issues.

Here’s a specific example from an organization that used Appsian360 to detect and respond to a brute force attack. They had just put changes into production the night before and detected that they were being hit with 3,500 logins a minute. At first, they thought they broke the system and were preparing to roll the project out of projection. Fortunately, they could quickly track down the IP addresses originating the attack and block them on the external firewall.

Appsian captured and displayed the appropriate data so the company could understand the problem and respond with the proper steps to effectively resolve the issue in a very short period of time.

Contact us today to learn how we can help you take a contextual, granular-level approach to secure your PeopleSoft environment. And enable you to detect and respond to PeopleSoft security threats such as brute force attacks, logins from multiple IP addresses, and many more.

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JD Edwards Security Audit: 7 Questions To Ask Before Choosing An Audit Solution

By Shiv Sujir • April 11, 2022

Auditing an ERP system like JD Edwards (JDE) for security risks is a complex, time-consuming, and tedious process. Security teams have to go through volumes of data on roles, authorizations, data access privileges, and usage logs to determine Segregation of Duties (SoD) conflicts, master data changes, and security gaps. It’s impractical and inefficient to do this exercise manually.  And even if you have a large enough budget and team, there is a high possibility that you will miss something that might cause you to fail your external audits. One of the best ways to overcome this challenge is to implement an auditing solution that can simplify your audit and give you the information you need to improve your JDE security.

How Do You Know If You Need An Auditing Solution?

A good auditing solution enables you to save a significant amount of time and effort required to perform the audit. It should be easy to implement, not require much training to use, and provide you with actionable insights into your security blind spots. Here are some likely scenarios to help you decide if getting an auditing solution is the right decision for you:

  • Achieving and maintaining SOX/FDA compliance is turning out to be too expensive
  • Satisfying external auditors is becoming an uphill task
  • Current audit issues are taking too long to resolve even as your next audit approaches
  • The internal audit team is too small, or you simply don’t have one
  • There is a consensus that security needs to be improved but no clear direction on priorities
  • The company leadership won’t approve security budgets without evidence of security gaps

Questions To Ask Before Choosing An Auditing Solution For JD Edwards Applications

With so many solutions out there, it can be hard to choose one that is right for your needs. Every company has unique use cases that require consideration. The below questions can help you determine if the solution you are evaluating delivers on utility, ROI, and more.

1. Is It Technically Challenging?

The goal of getting an auditing solution is to simplify your auditing process to save time and costs. If the solution is technically complex to implement and use, it defeats the purpose completely. Before releasing that PO, check how long it takes to implement the solution and if your team needs intensive training to use it. If the answer is yes, you’re probably going to spend more time on implementation and training, which will only add to your audit woes.

2. Does The Solution Come With Pre-Seeded SoD Rules?

Once you implement the solution, populating it with rules to identify SoD conflicts is going to be a tedious task. Look for solutions that have a comprehensive set of rules that enable you to detect security and compliance violations out of the box. Some rules can be customized based on your specific needs, but a good audit solution should have all the basic SoD rules pre-seeded.

3. Can It Scan All User Access Routes To Your JDE Applications?

Today, applications are being accessed from the office, remote locations, and personal devices. The audit solution you choose should be able to scan for all access paths into your JDE environment. Comprehensive access data about who has access to what ensures that your security reporting and SoD analysis is much more accurate

4. Is There A Provision To Add SoD Rule Exceptions?

False positives have always been an audit challenge. There might be situations where users might be granted privileged access due to business or IT needs, even if such authorizations create an SoD violation. The ability to apply rule exceptions so that they won’t show up as violations in subsequent audits prevents time wasted on investigating false positives. However, make sure that you can pull separate reports to check the validity of mitigated access.

5. Are The Reports Business-Friendly?

It’s important to involve business managers in risk management, but nobody wants to read through complex, incomprehensible reports. The audit solution you choose should provide meaningful information about users’ access and drill down to spot where changes are needed. This ensures that the time taken to review is much less, reducing your JDE security audit’s overall cycle times.

6. Is The Dashboard User-Friendly

This might look like a trivial detail, but the dashboard is your interface to the solution. Having the information you need presented in a simple and well-organized manner allows you to use the solution efficiently. The dashboard should prioritize high-risk items and give a high-level view of your JDE security posture.

7. What’s The ROI?

This is one of the most important questions you should ask before zeroing in on any solution. Do a thorough analysis of how much time, effort, and cost will the audit solution save if implemented. Also, check if the reports provided by the solution are accurate and insightful enough to make a case with your CFO for security improvement budgets. A good audit solution should be cost-effective and save considerable audit efforts that translate into cost savings.

Appsian’s Cloud-Based Security Audit Service For JD Edwards

Unlike complex GRC platforms that offer a huge range of capabilities, but require enormous investment in cost and effort, Appsian’s Cloud-based Security audit service is a specialized tool that does a specific job well for a small price. Users can just log in, request an audit, and the results are delivered within hours. The solution can be installed in about 30 minutes, followed by a half-hour training session for users to find their way around. It’s as simple as that.

Download the Appsian QCloud Security Audit Datasheet to simplify your JD Edwards audit journey.

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PeopleSoft Data Exfiltration: Be Alerted to the Violation of Data Security & Privacy Policies

By Michael Cunningham • April 8, 2022

The financial, reputational, and regulatory impact of a data breach can be catastrophic. Data exfiltration, whether malicious or accidental, typically originates from employees’ legitimate access to PeopleSoft and can be hard to prevent or detect with existing security capabilities.

In this Pathlock solution demo, you’ll learn how real-time analytics can monitor data security and privacy policy violations to prevent PeopleSoft data exfiltration.



PeopleSoft’s native architecture makes it easy for users to run queries and download data out of the application. Additionally, the lack of detailed user activity logs in PeopleSoft prevents organizations from having a clear view of how, when, and by whom specific data fields were viewed. When you think about all the different devices that people are using to access your system, you realize that you want to monitor those scenarios.

Pathlock can help you understand where all this sensitive data is going to be stored and accessed inside of PeopleSoft. We pre-categorized your data fields inside of PeopleSoft into Level One or Level Two sensitivity that you can customize later. We pull this information through to our analytics platform so you can not only monitor access and usage but also show you if anybody is writing queries that have access to that data.

Monitoring and Enforcing PeopleSoft Data Exfiltration Policies with Pathlock

Data exfiltration policy enforcement can be challenging in PeopleSoft because it lacks the logging features that provide visibility into user activity around data access and usage. That can make it difficult to distinguish whether users are accessing sensitive information for legitimate reasons or with malicious intent.

Pathlock’s logging feature records all user activity for all data access and transactions, allowing you to aggregate and visualize data trends such as access by data sensitivity level and access by user privilege level. Pathlock’s real-time analytics help you continuously monitor instances of query running and download attempts of sensitive data onto unauthorized devices, from suspicious locations, or outside business hours.

Contact us today to learn how we can help you take a proactive approach to detect and prevent PeopleSoft data privacy violations, including users viewing co-worker PII data.

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