Strategic Role Design to Enhance Security and Minimize Risk in Oracle Cloud

Poorly designed job roles stand out as the leading cause of audit findings. Segregation of Duties (SoD) conflicts and unnecessary exposure to critical and sensitive data are the main contributing factors to these audit violations. While Oracle Cloud ERP offers prebuilt (seeded) job roles, duty roles, and privileges that can expedite deployment, it’s important to recognize that while these serve as an initial framework, they can pose challenges by granting more access than necessary for specific job functions and inadequately addressing SoD concerns.

Security Structure

In Oracle Cloud ERP, users will receive one or more roles that dictate their access to menus, screens, and buttons, which determines the actions they can perform. These roles govern the user’s capabilities. Users are also allocated data security that regulates the information they can view during transactions or inquiries they undertake.

Oracle Cloud employs a role-based security model, with job roles and abstract roles serving as primary security components assigned to end-users. Job Roles encompass a set of privileges, assigned either directly to the job role or through duty roles, which are aggregated sets of privileges. These privileges collectively provide the job role with functional access to execute specific tasks within the Oracle environment.

In contrast, abstract roles provide users with foundational system access, allowing them to perform basic actions like submitting time or expense reports. Data security policies and data security components round out the comprehensive security model.

Creating Custom Job Roles and Design Considerations

It is important to mention that Oracle Cloud has new patch releases quarterly. When the quarterly update is released, seeded roles may be impacted with new functionality or those roles may have certain functionality removed in your environment. Fully customized job roles, however, remain unaffected.

The Oracle prebuilt seeded roles, on the other hand, can act as a good base starting point when designing a custom job role. The Oracle default job roles are not updateable, but you can copy them to make life easier when creating a role. Oracle provides prebuilt visualizations and simulations to assist with designing job roles without incorporating inherent risks and will help with making the best design decisions. This allows you to simulate risks and comply with access policies before assigning roles to users.

When designing a security role, striving to aim to achieve proactive segregation of duties and compliance considerations are essential. Role design should be scalable to accommodate business process changes, reduce ongoing maintenance efforts, and facilitate upgrades to future release versions.

Conclusion

While Oracle Cloud ERP provided job roles offer a foundation, the true strength lies in the ability to customize roles to align with the organization’s unique structure and compliance requirements. Beyond merely mitigating risk, creating job roles without inherent risks results in significant savings by eliminating the need for unnecessary remediation efforts. Although it demands additional time and effort, establishing your own customized roles within Oracle Cloud enhances internal controls, ensures compliance, reinforces security, and reduces SoD conflicts for your business.

Next Steps

Please contact one of our Oracle experts at any time to learn more about the benefits of proper Oracle Cloud ERP Role design.