Leading financial services firm secures data access in Workday with Kainos Smart Shield
“Smart Shield is so valuable in giving people the ability to proxy without exposing data that they shouldn't normally have access to – we’ve reduced the likelihood of exposing sensitive data from high (70% likelihood) to very low (less than 5% likelihood).”
The Challenge: Secure testing and rollouts in Workday
A global financial services organisation selected Workday to offer best-in-class employee experiences and modernise HR operations. However, frequent testing and configuration updates introduced data privacy risk, particularly when HR teams needed elevated data access to perform tasks.
The result was that: team members who proxied as managers or employees could inadvertently access sensitive compensation information outside their scope. This created a complex challenge - how to empower teams to test and work effectively without compromising security.
The Solution: Intelligent data masking with Smart Shield
To solve this, the organisation adopted Smart Shield, enabling intelligent data masking and fine-grained access control within Workday. With Smart Shield, HR teams can safely proxy to perform tasks without seeing confidential data irrelevant to their role. For instance, the talent team can now test as other users without accessing compensation information, eliminating unintentional data exposure.
International HR teams have benefited as well. Employees in one region can carry out tasks without viewing peer data from another region, supporting global privacy compliance and internal governance. Additionally, Smart Shield allows multiple HR functions - such as talent and compensation - to work within the same tenant without overlap, streamlining project execution while keeping data secure.
By enabling secure proxy access, Smart Shield remains a critical component in delivering secure, agile, and compliant Workday services - supporting both operational efficiency and data governance across the financial organisation’s global HR functions.