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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

Data privacy is often associated with how companies are allowed to collect and handle customer data. Lost in the data privacy breach headlines is that protecting employee information is just as critical for security and compliance. In fact, we have a lot of organizations who ask us to help them understand if, when, and how an employee is viewing co-worker PII data, especially within the same department.

In this Appsian solution demo, we’ll show you how real-time analytics can provide granular information and alerts when users are accessing and viewing other employee information. 

When organizations using PeopleSoft request the ability to monitor and detect when one employee accesses the PII data of another employee, data privacy isn’t always the number one reason for the request. Data security and employee safety are also factors. 

Of course, there are employees who require privileged access to sensitive and personal information to perform their daily tasks. However, those employees most likely do not need to access a co-worker’s PII, especially within the same department.  

Beyond data privacy, we’ve heard about situations where an employee would stalk a co-worker. They had a level of access that allowed them to look at the personal information of another employee such as their home address, phone numbers, ID numbers, etc.  Appsian allows you to create alerts around this kind of activity so you can quickly respond in an appropriate manner.

Appsian’s enhanced PeopleSoft’s logging capabilities and real-time analytics allow you to detect, understand, and report when an employee is viewing co-worker PII data. It provides granular data that shows you the specific employee ID that looked at personal data, the specific data viewed, to whom it belonged, and whether they’re within the same department. 

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. 

Every day, countless people have access to your PeopleSoft application, where they perform a variety of transactions and access critical data. But do you know who is accessing what, from where, and for what purpose? Or do you view your PeopleSoft application as a mysterious black box that YOU HOPE is capturing the level of transaction details you need to understand user behavior around data access and usage? 

Fortunately, adding transaction monitoring and real-time analytics to your PeopleSoft application can transform that mysterious black box into a white box that offers complete visibility into user activity. 

Why PeopleSoft Application Logs Aren’t Enough For Actionable Insights 

The reason why PeopleSoft applications are viewed as a black box is that organizations are likely to lose track of user activity once a user is authenticated into the system. This creates blind spots that allow bad actors to stay undetected for months or years. What’s more challenging is that native PeopleSoft app logs cannot even tell who accessed what, when, from what device, and why. 

PeopleSoft applications logs were initially designed for debugging and troubleshooting, which provides insufficient data for breach investigation and remediation. As a result, security teams often end up manually analyzing network and database logs and making assumption-based decisions. This leads to more false positives than actual suspicious activities and potential threats. 

How Transaction Logging & Real-Time Analytics Transform The Black Box Into A White Box

A white box, in this case, is your PeopleSoft application but with better clarity. The first big step is to have granular visibility into user activities. Here are three ways transaction logging and real-time analytics can help you achieve clarity and enable you to detect and prevent fraud arising from malicious activities within the system. 

1. Keeps You Audit-Ready 

If your recorded PeopleSoft app logs aren’t granular enough, your investigation teams will struggle to detect the threats in time. Transaction details like what data was accessed by whom, when, where, and why can determine the context of access and degree of risk. This information enables security teams to monitor user behavior around data access and usage. In addition, granular transaction logging and monitoring capabilities allow administrators to run reports and perform audits. 

2. Improved Compliance, Breach Investigation, And Remediation

With mounting regulations, it is crucial to have visibility into how sensitive PeopleSoft data is accessed to protect your organization from legal and financial repercussions. Companies storing PII must leverage contextual application logging data to ensure that sensitive information is accessed only by authorized users. To investigate and respond to breaches efficiently, organizations need to expand logging capabilities to capture additional information such as IP address or location, the webserver being accessed, user ID, pages accessed, actions performed, and more. 

3. Transaction Logs & Data Analytics For Real-Time Threat Detection

PeopleSoft breaches have become more user-centric in nature. Companies, therefore, need better visibility into real-time data access and usage trends. Taking all business transactions and aggregating them into visually compelling dashboards that highlight patterns, trends, and anomalies can help security personnel quickly detect and respond to threats. 

Appsian Takes the Mystery Out of Your PeopleSoft Application

When it comes to detecting and preventing data security breaches and privacy violations, hope is not a strategy. Unfortunately, native PeopleSoft logging provides limited data, leaving an incomplete audit trail of transaction-level user activity. This is what makes it a black box. 

Appsian helps you enhance your logging capabilities by capturing granular transaction details in real-time. The real-time analytics provided by Appsian360 helps convert your PeopleSoft application from a black box of mystery into a white box full of actionable insights. With Appsian360, you can –  

• Detect Data Security Threats In Real-Time: Enrich data access information with attributes like IP address, user role, geographic location, device, etc., and capture authentication trends like failed login attempts and be alerted to potential attacks. 
• Uncover Hidden Business Risks: Maintain a complete view of sensitive business transactions, and what (specific) users are doing to effectively detect and respond to fraud, theft, and errors by employees and third parties.
• Monitor Employee Productivity: Get detailed information on transaction volume, type of data accessed, contextual details on privileged sessions, and receive alerts on suspicious activities (e.g., unauthorized access). 

Schedule a demo with our PeopleSoft experts to learn how our transaction logging and real-time analytics can help you combat security threats, uncover hidden business risks, effectively respond to audit findings and ensure compliance. Without customizations or additional hardware. 

When it comes to PeopleSoft data privacy, the financial, reputational, and regulatory impact of having your employees’ or executives’ compensation or personal data accessed can be catastrophic.

In this Appsian solution demo, you’ll learn how real-time analytics can provide alerts if members of the same department look at each other’s compensation information. Or when a privileged user accesses an executive’s compensation data.

A common request we get from our PeopleSoft customers is to ensure that they are always alerted when somebody accesses an executive’s or co-worker’s compensation information or other personal data. Even when accessing this information is part of an employee’s daily responsibilities, they don’t need to be viewing it every time they access an employee’s record.

Previously, we demonstrated how dynamic data masking and real-time analytics work together to control & monitor access to sensitive information. Here, we’re focusing on compensation information. Receiving an alert and logging activity every time a user accesses this information is critical for monitoring and complying with data privacy policies.

This level of detail can also help organizations tell the difference between legitimate access or when a privileged user accesses this information outside the scope of their everyday responsibilities – which could indicate malicious intent by a disgruntled employee or a compromised account.

Appsian’s Real-Time Analytics allows you to track the number of times a user accesses that data during the day or outside of business hours. So instead of asking “if” a person should have access to that data, you can track how often and when that data is accessed.

Not only are you risking a data privacy violation, but a disgruntled employee could also cause internal conflicts and external PR issues if they leak executive compensation information. Knowing who accessed what and when is critical for ensuring policies are met while aiding in response tactics with full forensic details.

Appsian helps you take a proactive approach to detect and prevent PeopleSoft data privacy violations, including users accessing executive compensation information.

Contact us today to learn how we can help you with alerts when executive or co-worker compensation data is accessed. In addition, we provide the fastest path for applying data masking and logging across all necessary data fields in PeopleSoft.

Security threats exist at the application, transaction, and data level. Unfortunately, default PeopleSoft data masking and logging capabilities are insufficient to meet today’s modern data security and privacy requirements.

In this Appsian Solution demo, we’ll show you how dynamic data masking and real-time analytics work together to secure identity, control & monitor access to sensitive transactions, protect UI data, and provide deep visibility into data access and usage.

While all activity should be monitored for security and compliance purposes, high privilege user accounts should be continuously monitored and analyzed for potentially malicious trends.

Click-to-View Data Masking

Allowing access to sensitive data fields to everyone with valid login credentials can lead to unnecessary exposure, resulting in non-compliance with regulatory requirements such as Sarbanes-Oxley, PCI DSS, HIPAA, GDPR, etc. Appsian offers several types of dynamic data masking, including full, partial, click-to-view masking, or complete redaction to any data field in PeopleSoft.

As we demonstrate in this video, click-to-view field masking helps protect against unnecessary exposure of sensitive data while still allowing users to view data with expressed intent. The Appsian Security Platform (ASP) creates very specific and targeted logs in PeopleSoft. These logging features like click-to-view masking develop a complete audit trail of all data access for quick reference.

Real-Time Analytics

Appsian’s transaction-level activity logging captures granular, real-time information on who a user is, what they’re trying to access, and where they’re coming from. With that information, our real-time analytics application aggregates data access and usage trends. Then, it displays them on a visually rich dashboard, eliminating the time-consuming need to translate unstructured logs into actionable information.

Strengthen PeopleSoft Data Security and Privacy with Appsian

Appsian helps you take a proactive approach to detect and prevent PeopleSoft security threats. In addition, we provide the fastest path for applying PeopleSoft data masking and logging across all necessary data fields.

Contact us today to learn how we can help you quickly respond to security threats with full forensic information and prevent costly data breaches and non-compliance penalties.