Hire to Retire: Workday Security Best Practices for the Employee Lifecycle
Implementing Workday is a significant milestone, but sustaining success post go-live involves effectively managing your employees and safeguarding their data. Each stage of the employee lifecycle—from hiring and onboarding to benefits enrollment, payroll updates, and beyond—comes with its own set of challenges. To ensure smooth operations as you stabilise, it’s important to have rigorous Workday lifecycle testing and a consistent approach to data security. Here are five best practices to strengthen Workday security throughout the employee lifecycle.
1. Set Up Role-Based Access Controls (RBAC) for each employee lifecycle milestone
RBAC is essential to maintain security in Workday. It ensures that your employees have the appropriate level of access at each stage of their lifecycle. As employees progress from onboarding through department transfers, or promotions, for example, permissions should be updated accordingly
An effective RBAC strategy not only protects sensitive data but also guarantees that employees can access only the information necessary for their role at each stage.
Best practices for Workday employee lifecycle testing:
- Design custom roles that match lifecycle stages, such as onboarding, payroll administration, and benefits management, to control access to sensitive data.
- Use Workday security groups (user-based, role-based, or segment-based) to manage permissions. This ensures that employees can only access the data necessary for their lifecycle stage.
- Perform regular security testing and audits, ideally on a quarterly basis, to validate permissions and detect any anomalies. These audits help prevent unauthorised access to sensitive information during lifecycle changes like promotions or updates to benefits.
2. Monitor access and activity across the employee lifecycle
Continuous oversight is important to detect unauthorised activities such as login attempts, data access, and unusual user behaviors across the employee lifecycle. Integrating Workday activity tracking with your broader security framework enhances your ability to identify and resolve security risks before they have the chance to escalate.
Best practices for Workday data security monitoring:
- Automate alerts for unusual access patterns, i.e., attempts to view restricted data during payroll adjustments or annual reviews.
- Integrate monitoring with a Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) system for a comprehensive view of user behavior.
- Generate reports to track data access during key lifecycle events, such as payroll updates or benefits enrollment. This approach is beneficial for Workday data security.
3. Regularly update and test security policies for key employee lifecycle events
Regularly updating and testing policies is essential for effective Workday security testing, especially as you address risks at each employee lifecycle stage.
Tailor your policies to specific milestones—prioritising data security and identity verification during onboarding, and ensuring timely deprovisioning at offboarding, for example.
Best practices for lifecycle-aligned security policies:
- Develop and update Workday security policies for each lifecycle stage, such as hiring, benefits opt-in, and offboarding, to address unique security risks.
- Establish a data privacy risk framework to define, categorise, and manage data risks. This approach helps align Workday data security measures with organisational policies.
- Conduct simulated incident response drills for specific lifecycle stages, such as unauthorised access during benefits opt-in, to refine your response strategy and prepare for real security incidents.
4. Audit privileged access during the course of the employee lifecycle
Privileged accounts, like those held by HR managers and system administrators, carry higher security risks, especially during key lifecycle events involving access to sensitive data. To strengthen Workday data security, make sure you’re auditing these accounts frequently, as they’re often prime targets for insider threats or unauthorised access.
Best practices for auditing privileged access in Workday:
- Implement a “Least Privilege” model to restrict privileged account access based on lifecycle needs, with frequent reviews to ensure permissions remain appropriate.
- Set up or automate privileged activity logging for sensitive lifecycle events, such as payroll adjustments, promotions, or offboarding, to quickly detect and investigate suspicious activity.
- Consider Just-in-Time (JIT) access policies for lifecycle-specific privileges, granting access only for specific tasks and revoking it immediately after. This reduces the risk of data exposure.
5. Integrate Workday security with organisational policies for consistency
For a secure and unified approach, align your Workday security configuration with your organisation’s broader data privacy and security policies. Start by setting up a system-agnostic data privacy policy that clearly defines roles, responsibilities, and incident response procedures.
Then, integrate Workday security with these policies to help you establish consistent standards across the business.
Best practices for integrating Workday security with organisational policies:
- Define organisational policies on data privacy and security, including roles, data types, and incident response protocols, and ensure they align with Workday security policies.
- Regularly audit and update policies to reflect changes in employee lifecycle processes and regulatory requirements, such as SoX, GDPR or HIPAA.
- Conduct or automate compliance checks and Workday security testing to ensure policies remain up-to-date and effective, particularly in relation to data privacy and employee lifecycle testing.
To maintain Workday data security post-go-live, take a proactive, lifecycle-aligned approach. Implement RBAC, conduct continuous monitoring, and regularly test security policies—each step strengthens your Workday environment to support growth and compliance as you stabilise post go-live.
By aligning security testing with organisational policies, auditing privileged access, and setting up continuous monitoring, you create a secure, scalable Workday solution across the employee lifecycle. These strategies protect sensitive data and allow your organisation to fully leverage Workday in a secure, resilient environment from the moment you go live.
The advantage of automation for Workday security throughout the employee lifecycle
It’s worth noting that these practices can be difficult to achieve manually. Managing RBAC requires you to constantly update permissions to match user roles, which is time-consuming and prone to errors. Monitoring your system continuously for suspicious activities or misconfigurations is equally challenging, as it demands around-the-clock vigilance that your team may struggle to sustain as they become familiar with and make adjustments to Workday.
Testing security policies regularly also adds to the complexity, as manual processes can overlook vulnerabilities and put additional pressure on busy teams. Each of these tasks, however, are critical to support stabilisation and compliance, but manually approaching them risks inefficiencies, missed issues, and potential security gaps.
Automated testing and security monitoring can streamline and strengthen your Workday security as you navigate the post-go-live phase. With automated testing, you can regularly and efficiently validate security policies and configurations, ensuring RBACs and other security measures stay aligned with your policies and compliance requirements. Automation reduces the risk of human error, helping you catch potential misconfigurations or access inconsistencies early—before they become security vulnerabilities during periods of intense or irregular change.
Automated security monitoring adds continuous oversight of your Workday environment, flagging suspicious activities in real time for proactive threat response. For example, it can quickly identify unusual behaviour around privileged accounts or detect unauthorised access attempts, sending instant alerts so your security team can act immediately.
This lets you respond quickly to potential security issues without exhausting your resources.
Ultimately, automation helps you to reduce manual oversight demands and maintain a high level of protection and Workday operability across the employee lifecycle—from go-live and beyond.
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