The Perfect Match: How Match Group are Securing Workday Data Privacy with Smart Shield
A truly global organisation with over 2,500 staff members spread across 23 countries, Match Group is at the cutting edge of bringing people together and revolutionising the way people connect.
With hundreds of millions of users of its many sub-brands worldwide, data privacy is always important for Match Group. In fact, it’s even a strategic focus operationally, with data privacy an essential consideration for the company in regard to employee data in Workday–the engine that powers Match Group’s back-office.
In this interview, we talk to Match Group’s Carolyn Kelfer, Director of Financial Systems, who explains why data privacy is top of mind for the company, why it chose Smart Shield, and how the solution's intelligent data masking for Workday can have a positive impact across the business.
Can you tell us a little bit about Match Group’s Workday journey so far?
When we went live with Workday, we’re talking about an international implementation in phases. Our first ‘Go-Live’ was in April 2021 for our North America businesses. We then went live a year later with our EMEA and part of our APAC businesses in April of 2022
We are wrapping up our multiple implementation phases with our Korean business that we acquired in 2021 set to go live later this year.
Our strategic plan has always been to unify under a single ERP system—we previously had different ERP’s based on region and a number of businesses that used their own various systems with third party accounting.
The real goal ultimately was to bring the company under one umbrella where we have better and consistent data with a faster close process.
One source of truth for everything?
Exactly, it was taking us forever to do data analysis after close and so with the different systems and the different chart of accounts, unifying that under a single solution in Workday has been fantastic.
Where does data privacy fit in to that ‘one source of truth’ for Match Group, operationally speaking?
From a data privacy standpoint, making sure that the appropriate people have the appropriate access to data within Workday is central to my role.
Obviously, from a regulatory standpoint, compliance is a huge factor for us as a business, but for me and my team security is very much a focus too.
From that perspective, security in Workday is fantastic but can be complex. There's no single source solution for monitoring and evaluating segregation of duties issues, role assignments, domain security and BP security. Rolling all of that up into one kind of analysis can be an extremely complicated and manual exercise.
A key challenge that Smart Shield has solved is the ability for testers and administrators to proxy as end users while masking sensitive user data. We couldn’t fully perform proxy testing before as comprehensively as we’d have liked to.
How are you managing that right now in the midst of huge implementation projects?
I have to give Kainos credit here because they've come up with some great tools to help us. Smart Audit, Smart Test and now Smart Shield have assisted us in knowing whether or not we're in the right place or on the right track with our business process design, as well as assist us in managing transitions and testing during our implementations - including adherence to strict data privacy requirements.
How is Smart Shield helping your teams currently?
When we're talking about the implementation of our FINS modules over time, a key challenge that Smart Shield has solved is the ability for testers and administrators to proxy as end users while they are performing unit, end-to-end or user acceptance testing while masking sensitive user data. We couldn’t fully perform proxy testing before as comprehensively as we’d have liked to.
And so keeping sensitive data masked, while still giving the team the ability to proxy as an accounting manager or as an approver when you're testing for an implementation, you need to be testing all of the various steps within the business process. Smart Shield lets us do that, whereas before, we had to get 12 people in a room so we could complete the entire approval chain, without having somebody there to proxy and have visibility that they shouldn't.
12 people—that’s a lot of time and effort that could’ve been useful elsewhere during the implementation projects.
Yes absolutely. It was a huge waste of time for my team to have to all go into a room just to carry out end-to-end testing because they’re the only users who can proxy. Smart Shield has alleviated the need for that drain on time and resources.
We have continued to see time savings subsequent to implementations because we consistently make improvements to our Workday environment. We're currently implementing Supplier Portal and we require the ability to proxy and help with that kind of testing.
Kainos has been a tremendous Smart Shield partner. It has been the easiest and simplest implementation I’ve done...so we very much work well together, and I see that continuing down the line.
And as we get more and more advanced with our Workday configuration, we're going to want the ability for any user to complete an entire BP transaction by themselves without needing the help of a Workday administrator.
That’s certainly a plus—are there other use cases you’re thinking of for Smart Shield?
I'm excited about the benefit of users being exposed to areas in Workday they otherwise would not have seen if not for proxying under Smart Shield. With security and Workday, you see what you're given access to and nothing else. For users to be able to see what an accounting manager sees if they're an accountant, or what a controller sees if they're an accounts payable specialist, that's going to provide exposure and education to Workday outside of their daily role, which hopefully will allow the user base to better understand other functional areas and the capabilities within the Workday environment.
Were there any other solutions you tried before Smart Shield?
We evaluated data scrambling, seeing if it would meet our needs and allow our users to be able to proxy without seeing sensitive data like performance evaluations, payroll information, salaries, bonus, benefits—even down to certain worker documents.
But what we found when we enabled the native data scrambling and masking functionality within Workday, we still had gaps where people could clearly and easily see compensation data. Everything in the person's inbox was still unmasked, which allowed proxy users to circumvent our masking functionality. It was an incomplete and inadequate solution for us. Smart Shield gives us that comprehensive coverage.
Outside of your team, are users across the business looking forward to getting to grips with Smart Shield?
Now that we're live with Smart Shield, I've been talking with our HCM director, and I gave him the heads up that there may be some cross functional usage there.
I'm seeing this as a potential opportunity for them as well to kind of get rid of those overly complicated proxy policies and have their users really be able to see anything they need to see, but mask things that they don't, so I definitely see some potential there.
Are there any other impacts you foresee Smart Shield having for the future?
I think the main pillars are giving people the access to do their end-to-end testing and frankly, I see them doing more testing and more robust testing if they have this ability. We always get cut off because we have 30 minutes or an hour but there may be more test scenarios that they want to run, so we’ll have more time to be able to do that with Smart Shield.
On the other hand, we may get better data quality if we’re able to go into a test environment and run entire transactions before they do them in production. So there’s definitely potential for some data quality improvement impacts too.
Finally, how have you found working with Kainos as a partner?
Kainos has been a tremendous Smart Shield partner. It has been the easiest and simplest implementation I’ve done. I may have spent a total cumulative 10 hours on the implementation, so that's been a huge win for me and my team.
The Kainos team behind Smart Shield basically configured an entire profile based on my dictation of what I needed masked, so we very much work well together, and I see that continuing down the line.