Separation of Duties: Your First Line of Defense Against Insider Threats

Read full article from Saviynt here: https://saviynt.com/blog/separation-of-duties-your-first-line-of-defense-against-insider-risk/?utm_source=nhimg

Separation of Duties is simple: no single person should control multiple critical steps in a process.

This safeguard isn’t just about stopping frauds, limiting mistakes and reducing the blast radius if something goes wrong.

• In finance, if one person can create a vendor, submit invoices, and approve payments, it doesn’t take malicious intent for things to spiral. A single error can cause significant loss.
• In IT, if an administrator can create user accounts and approve access to sensitive data, you’ve effectively handed them the keys to the kingdom.

SoD isn’t just compliance, its security, resilience, and business protection.

Identity Debt: The Hidden Enemy

At Saviynt, we see SoD violations every day. They’re not edge cases, they’re everywhere.

Why? Because organisations carry identity debt:

• Legacy roles that were never cleaned up.
• Outdated access models.
• Employees with way more permissions than they need.

A few real-world examples:

• Origin Energy found years of identity debt during a digital transformation. Cleaning it up fixed SoD risks across apps.
• ENGIE modernised IT but lacked visibility into who had access where. Saviynt helped enforce clean access boundaries.
• First Solar, operating in a heavily regulated industry, needed to ensure engineers couldn’t touch financial systems. Legacy permissions made that tricky, until they streamlined with Saviynt.

Why SoD Gets Messy (and How to Fix It)

SoD gets complicated quickly in environments where finance, HR, and IT systems all overlap. Violations often slip through across multiple applications.

That’s where Saviynt Identity Cloud makes the difference:

• Detective + Preventive Controls – Catch violations before access is granted and flag existing risks.
• Cross-Application Risk Analysis – Because conflicts rarely stay confined to one app.
• Pre-Built Rulesets – For SAP, Oracle, Workday, Salesforce, and more.
• SoD Workbench & Insights – Clear visibility into violations and risks.

This is how you move from “check-the-box compliance” to real-time guardrails.

Why Separation of Duties Matters Now

Every new insider scandal underscores the same truth: without SoD, the door is wide open for fraud, mistakes, and compliance failures.

With SoD, you protect not just your systems, but also your customers, your reputation, and your people.

So the next time someone says, “SoD isn’t a priority right now”, remind them that the companies in the headlines probably thought the same thing.

At the end of the day, Separation of Duties is more than an audit requirement. It’s your first line of defense against insider risk.

And with the Saviynt Identity Cloud, SoD isn’t bolted on, it’s built in.