6 Key Reasons Why You Should Consider Security & Compliance Studio for D365 F&SCM

In 2023, 74% of organizations reported that insider attacks have become more frequent. (Source: Cybersecurity Insiders 2023 Threat Report)

What exactly does that mean?

It means that in an age where data continues to grow at unprecedented rates and is considered the lifeblood of any thriving organization, your data is just not safe!

More than ever before, companies today need to actively tackle the threat of data misuse, loss, and theft, lest they find themselves at the receiving end of an expensive lawsuit or reputational damage.

And if that wasn’t depressing enough, organizations, especially those belonging to highly regulated industries, need to invest heavily in compliance, both in terms of people and technology, so that they can avoid being charged with fines, penalties, or even criminal charges.

And this is true even for the most successful businesses in the world today, who would need to go through external audits to prove their adherence to industry standards and regulatory requirements.

However, not all companies go about the right way in mitigating security risks and cutting down compliance costs. While smaller companies put most of their focus in marketing and promotional activities and altogether neglect data security, medium to large companies employ a team of risk, security, and compliance professionals to manage security and compliance without putting proper data governance processes into place. Many companies do not consider employing technology to protect their business data or infrastructure against data loss or theft, and struggle with assigning roles and duties in a risk-free way.

Adhering to industry standards and best practices, employing a knowledgeable Security, Risk, and Compliance team, and having the right infrastructure and solutions in place can help you here.

To-Increase Security & Compliance Studio is one such software built for companies managing their finance and supply chain management processes in Microsoft Dynamics 365. This solution empowers companies to optimize and manage their licensing, security, user management, risk, audit, and compliance processes efficiently and reliably from within D365 F&SCM.

Let’s dive into the 6 key benefits your business can reap from Security & Compliance Studio.

Top 6 Reasons to Consider Security & Compliance Studio for Microsoft Dynamics 365 F&SCM

It is no secret that security and compliance management go together, and that there is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to handling them. Sensitive data will always be at risk, one way or another. Therefore, having security and compliance policies in place that work for you are crucial.

This is where an all-inclusive solution like Security & Compliance Studio can help. Our solution helps protect your organization’s sensitive data and ensures that employees only have access to the information they require to perform their tasks in the best possible manner. The solution enables you to establish security policies that support and optimize audit processes, licensing, user management, and overall security. This can primarily prevent any security-related errors, data misuse, and fraud.

Here are the 6 essential benefits your organization can gain from this solution.

1. Manage role-based security with ease

Security & Compliance Studio allows you to record steps performed by business users to complete tasks. From that recording, you can easily match their role with existing security objects or create new ones to finalize the role. This helps you optimize user rights to the preferred user license, making the entire process of role matching not only time-efficient but also cost-effective in the long run.

Moreover, given that you have complete control of your Subscriber License (SL) status, you have the opportunity to make use of your licensing optimally. This ensures that none of your users have unnecessary privileges, eliminating the chances of you ending up with a more expensive license.

2. Avoid data misuse and internal fraud

To reduce the risks associated with data misuse and/or internal fraud, Security & Compliance Studio lets you limit user rights so that no user has access to data that’s not required for their role. The solution provides workspaces (including graphs and charts) created with ‘embedded analytics’ technology. This enables embedded insights into Segregation of Duties (SoD) violations and conflict areas, including non-compliant roles and users.

These charts also offer actionable business intelligence (BI) with drill-down features, helping organizations with more detailed and specific data. Moreover, the SoD rules effectively capture the possible conflicts and violations that may occur during role creation and assignment.

3. Easily adhere to regulations like GDPR and SOX

Security & Compliance Studio proves to be the perfect tool for those looking to establish security policies that comply with ISO, GDPR, or similar quality management standards. It enables you to keep an audit trail of who can access what data or who has accessed it in the past. Furthermore, the solution makes the Segregation of Duties, Privileges, and Entry Points easy by providing the appropriate level of protection for the key information in your ERP system and by controlling who has access to what data.

4. Manage changing security needs effectively

With constantly evolving security needs, changes or modifications to access requests can be a demanding process. Our Security & Compliance Studio makes this process easy inside Dynamics 365 F&SCM, by increasing the traceability of any security changes in your system. The automatic matching control feature lets you comprehend and track the various roles and users by their assigned security levels. In addition, it allows you to automatically find the best matching security role by identifying any missing aspects in terms of access within a security role and the duties and privileges which may need to be added.

5. Support business transformation and evolution

Re-engineering the organization's resource hierarchy and user tasks on a timely basis is not uncommon, especially in the age of digital transformation. This is because mergers & acquisitions, new entities, and new departments lead to a situation where standard security roles often become outdated and need upgrading. With Security & Compliance Studio, you can automatically stay updated with all your security needs and easily adopt the new changes.

6. Perform quicker and more detailed security audits

The solution significantly reduces time spent on internal IT audits because auditors are given dynamic access to all the relevant data via simple-to-understand representations. This data is automatically stored at the global, role, and user levels, along with the list of current and historic security events and logs, across all legal entities. The audit functionality is further strengthened by the security audit report, which allows the security administrator in the company to track changes for almost 40 different event types.

What are some additional benefits of Security & Compliance Studio?

Apart from streamlining security and compliance processes in D365 F&SCM, our solution can also help you in the following ways:

1. Integrated risk management

Security & Compliance Studio provides creation forms for easier Segregation of Duties, Privileges, and Entry Points, as well as embedded insights to bring out any violations. This helps in avoiding internal data theft and the malicious use of your data in Dynamics 365 F&SCM.

2. User license optimization

With the help of a re-engineered Scenario Analysis Framework, Security & Compliance Studio empowers security administrators to make informed decisions, ensuring cost-effective licensing. It also offers comprehensive simulation capabilities for thorough role planning, thus supporting role creation with various license types.

3. Security role design

The solution helps you merge multiple roles into one single security role and create custom security roles from duties, entry points, and privileges (both attached and unattached to any duties). You can also simultaneously view the license type at every stage.

4. Stand-in management

Easily set up user replacements with a given start date and end date to ensure that a user will get access only for the time required. Additionally, the solution helps you check for SoD violations in advance.

5. Security Snapshots

Security & Compliance Studio helps you create security snapshots of user roles and assignments as required by your company’s compliance policy. You can use the solution to define the scope of a user’s role within the organization and keep a log of his task assignments. This allows you to use two or more security snapshots to get better visibility into the role/assignment changes, helping you monitor potential security threats.

Exploring Security & Compliance Studio for your business

If you’re a user of Dynamics 365 Finance & Supply Chain Management or are considering upgrading to this ERP, Security & Compliance Studio can prove to be a great asset to your organization. This unique solution can help you take charge of your data security and streamline your audit, risk, and compliance management processes with ease.

To learn more about the in-depth features this solution offers, download our solution factsheet below.