Four data privacy tips for CIOs during Workday deployments
Workday deployments can pose a complex balancing act of prioritisation for CIOs. Though the system provides robust data security out-of-the-box, CIOs must ensure appropriate data privacy governance and controls are implemented to avoid the risk of data exposure. If they don’t, companies can be left vulnerable to serious financial, legal, and reputational consequences.
However, when the correct governance and controls framework is applied, Workday provides a strong foundation for your organisational, geographical and legislative data privacy obligations. In this blog, Kim Freestone, Principal Product Manager at Kainos, shares four Workday data privacy tips that CIOs should consider ahead of Workday deployments to deliver value, success, and security.
1. Adopt the principle of ‘least privileged access’
When deploying Workday for the first time, it’s best to follow the guiding principle of ‘least privileged access’. This means only giving data access to specific users who need it to fulfil the requirements of their role. For CIOs, it can be difficult to strike a balance between granting sufficient access to sensitive data in Workday and overexposure.
Every organisation will have a different approach to risk, usually dependent on its industry. While some companies will value speed and agility in how business processes are managed, others will prioritise the sensitivity of the data they hold. This will determine how companies govern their data.
Sensitive data is safely protected within Workday’s privacy and security framework, but it’s up to individual businesses to decide on the governance to control access to it. By applying the principle of ‘least privileged access’, CIOs can mitigate the risks associated with organisational data access - a topic we recently covered in detail on our recent CIO webinar with data privacy expert Brook Conner.
2. Use a control framework to comply with data privacy law
Complying with ever-evolving data privacy laws – especially if operating in multiple geographies – can be vastly time-consuming and complex for companies. Regulations are continually becoming more rigorous to reflect the rise of global cyber-attacks and potential data breaches. For CIOs, the possibility of such a breach could lead to financial penalties and reputational damage. The importance of compliance with data privacy regulations was recently reinforced as tech giant Meta faced a €1.2 ($1.3) billion fine for failing to comply with GDPR.
By adopting a rigorous governance framework that leverages repeatable, scalable and automated controls, CIOs can define roles, responsibilities, and processes to ensure accountability for data access. This makes it simpler for CIOs to evidence the effectiveness of their controls and demonstrate compliance with data privacy legislation.
3. Grant controlled access to data
In Workday production, pre-configured security settings protect sensitive organisational data or personally identifiable information (PII). However, the data transfer relationship between tenants can pose unintentional risks. In production, data refreshes into Sandbox, potentially revealing sensitive information to users without production access. Risks are also heightened in non-production tenants, where users are routinely granted elevated access, such as testers using proxy for business process approvals.
Data security relies on trust between an organisation and its employees. When a data breach occurs or sensitive information is accessed without authorisation, that trust is undermined, resulting in significant legal, financial, and reputational repercussions. To protect mutual assurance, it's critical to control access to sensitive data, even in non-production, using automated tools like data-masking. By implementing data-masking, sensitive information can be identified across the tenant and hidden, allowing support teams to work without compromising security.
4. Use automation to deliver comprehensive data privacy controls for Workday
Smart Shield, a dedicated data-masking solution designed specifically for Workday, reinforces access controls when it comes to data protection. Smart Shield acts as a secure layer between your organisation’s most sensitive data and the teams responsible for supporting and maintaining Workday.
Smart Shield seamlessly masks sensitive information within Workday, without causing disruptions to the user experience. This includes masking rules even in proxy so that users can receive elevated access but are prohibited from seeing the sensitive data that comes with this access.
Using automation, organisations can strike the right balance between data accessibility and security, supporting the integrity of data governance controls and complementing the principle of ‘least privileged access’.
With a data-masking tool like Smart Shield, CIOs can also demonstrate their commitment to data privacy protection by ensuring their employees’ most sensitive data is appropriately managed and safeguarded.