NetSuite Security Access Governance

NetSuite Access Governance
Active Governance Oracle Ascend

Enhancing NetSuite Security with
Advanced Policy-based Access Governance

NetSuite's cloud-based ERP system has become essential for businesses managing their operations, finances, and customer relationships. However, as you grow and your use of NetSuite becomes more complex, a significant challenge arises: effective access governance. Although NetSuite provides basic security features, these often do not meet the complex needs of digital environments.

This guide emphasizes the crucial role of policy-based access governance in NetSuite environments, while also highlighting the limitations of its built-in security features. More importantly, it discusses how policy-based access governance solutions can effectively address these shortcomings, significantly enhancing both security measures and compliance standards for NetSuite users. By exploring these advanced approaches, we aim to equip you with the knowledge necessary to strengthen your existing NetSuite ecosystem against emerging cyber threats and increasingly stringent regulatory and audit requirements.


The Strategic Impact of Access Governance


Access Governance is an essential framework that enhances your organization's security, controls, and operations. An Access Governance solution, particularly a policy-based one, serves as a crucial defense against data breaches, fraud, and unauthorized access to systems and data. By ensuring that users can only perform actions that align with their roles—and by keeping track of these actions - Access Governance helps maintain smooth processes and improves security.


Key Business Benefits


  • Business Agility: Enable secure, controlled access for new initiatives
  • Risk Reduction: Mitigate the risk of data breaches and internal fraud
  • Compliance Assurance: Meet regulatory requirements more effectively
  • Operational Efficiency: Streamline user access management processes


Limitations of Native NetSuite Security


NetSuite's basic security features often fall short of meeting the complex needs of organizations. Let's take a closer look at these limitations and examine them in greater depth.


Complex Role Management

As your organization grows and develops, managing roles in NetSuite becomes increasingly challenging due to the following:


  • Overwhelming Number of Permissions: NetSuite offers over 636 distinct permissions governing 4,923 separate tasks, searches, and records, making it difficult for administrators to maintain a clear overview of access rights.
  • Granular Task Assignment: Each role can be assigned numerous tasks, complicating management. Each role may have specific preferred or required list views for every record and transaction type.
  • Role Proliferation: Organizations often create many custom roles to address specific needs, resulting in role sprawl and increased complexity.
  • Inheritance Issues: NetSuite's role inheritance model can make it difficult to fully understand a user's permissions, as they may inherit rights from multiple roles.


Example: A company with 500 employees may have over 50 custom roles, each with unique combinations of permissions. When a new user joins, identifying the appropriate role and ensuring they have the correct access - without exceeding permissions - can be a time-consuming and error-prone process.


Audit Integrity Challenges

As your business grows and evolves, maintaining the integrity and security of your audit data becomes increasingly challenging due to the following factors:


  • Data Manipulation Risks: Keeping audit data in the same system as your transactional data from NetSuite, raises the risk of manipulation. Users with access to both can alter audit samples to hide their actions, and IT teams may change data and disable important controls.
  • Access Control Issues: Ensuring proper access control is more difficult when audit and transactional systems are interconnected. Users involved in transactions may have unneeded access to audit data, which complicates the maintenance of segregation of duties and increases the risk of fraud and errors.
  • Change Management Issues: Keeping audit data within NetSuite can create problems. Quarterly updates or patches may unintentionally compromise audit data integrity, leading to potential data loss or inconsistencies.
  • Historical Data Preservation: Maintaining historical audit data for analysis and reconciliations is complex. NetSuite focuses on current data, often archiving previous years, making it difficult to reconstruct past audits or investigate historical fraud without an independent data vault.


Example: A company utilizes an audit tool within NetSuite, where data and security features are interconnected. An IT team member with access to both NetSuite and the audit system could potentially grant themselves permission to create a supplier, disable the control monitor and audit application, process a fraudulent payment, and then revert these changes - all without detection due to their unrestricted access.


Inadequate Segregation of Duties (SoD)

NetSuite's built-in security roles often fail to address modern SoD requirements:


  • Outdated Role Designs: Pre-defined roles in NetSuite may not align with current best practices for Segregation of Duties, which increases the risk of fraud and control violations. NetSuite's built-in security roles are based on outdated design frameworks and do not adequately address Segregation of Duties risks. Assigning these pre-defined roles without careful analysis can lead to potential fraud and control violations.
  • Limited Segregation of Duties Controls: NetSuite's native features are limited in identifying and preventing segregation of duties (SoD) conflicts across roles and permissions. As a result, many companies find it challenging to establish effective SoD controls using only NetSuite's built-in capabilities.
  • Manual Segregation of Duties Analysis: Organizations often have to rely on manual, time-consuming processes to effectively implement Segregation of Duties.


Example: A user with the "Accountant" role may have permission to both create and approve journal entries, which violates basic Segregation of Duties principles. Identifying and resolving such conflicts among hundreds of users and roles presents a significant challenge.


Limited Visibility into User Access

Conducting thorough access reviews using only NetSuite's native capabilities is often inefficient:


  • Lack of Comprehensive Reports: NetSuite doesn´t provide easy-to-understand, consolidated reports of user access across the entire system.
  • Manual Data Extraction: Administrators often need to manually extract and compile data from multiple sources to get a complete picture of user access.
  • Time-Consuming Review Process: Without automated tools, reviewing and certifying access rights for all users can take weeks or even months.
  • Difficulty in Tracking Changes: NetSuite's built-in tools may lack efficient methods for tracking and auditing changes in user access over time. Additionally, NetSuite does not provide accessible transaction logs to identify malicious use of client-side APIs.


Example: A company with 500 NetSuite users needs to conduct a quarterly access review. The IT team spends weeks using native NetSuite tools to generate reports, manually compare access rights, and follow up with managers for certifications. 


Additional Limitations


  • Lack of Context-Aware Access Control: NetSuite's native security model doesn't easily support dynamic, context-based access restrictions, such as limiting access based on IP address or time of day.
  • Limited Integration with Identity Providers: While NetSuite supports single sign-on (SSO), integrating with identity and access management (IAM) solutions for more granular control is difficult.
  • Inefficient User Provisioning/De-provisioning: NetSuite does not have strong workflows for automatically granting or revoking access based on HR events or other triggers, which can lead to potential security gaps during employee onboarding, transfers, or departures.
  • Complex out-of-the-box roles: The Administrator role in NetSuite provides users with extensive transactional capabilities, which may increase the risk of fraud. Furthermore, users assigned to the Administrator role and the role itself do not appear in access reports within NetSuite. This limitation affects visibility and auditing efforts.


These limitations highlight the necessity for you to explore Access Governance solutions that can enhance the security of your NetSuite environment while addressing complex requirements.


The Need for Advanced Policy-based Access Governance


To overcome the limitations of NetSuite access management, you should consider using specialized access governance solutions. The ideal solution should enable:


Automated Segregation of Duties Management

An automated solution is essential for effective access control. Policy-based Access governance solutions enhance security by carefully managing user access and preventing unauthorized actions. The right solutions will use real-time data to quickly identify and remediate threats, ensuring rigorous control over user access.

By leveraging analytics, these systems continuously monitor user activities and promptly alert managers to any suspicious behavior or policy violations. This proactive approach significantly reduces the risk of fraud, data breaches, and compliance issues. Furthermore, these solutions automate the entire process of granting and revoking access, ensuring that permissions are kept up-to-date as roles change. This automation enhances your security, reduces administrative overhead, and increases efficiency.


Privileged Access Management (PAM)

To protect your critical assets, you need more than standard access controls. Access Governance solutions that provide Privileged Access Management capabilities (PAM) enhance security by effectively managing privileged accounts and preventing unauthorized actions. These solutions use real-time data to identify and address threats, ensuring tight control over high-level access.

Advanced analytics continuously monitor privileged user activities and alert you to suspicious behavior or policy violations, significantly reducing the risk of data breaches and control issues. Additionally, access governance systems automate the granting and revocation of privileged access, applying Just-in-Time principles to ensure appropriate permissions as roles change, thereby improving security and efficiency.


Automated User Lifecycle Management

When selecting an Access Governance solution, it's important to find options that offer advanced automated user provisioning and integrated access policy checks throughout the entire process. This approach helps to identify and prevent access-related risks before they enter your system, streamlining the user lifecycle from onboarding to offboarding. By automating these key processes, you ensure consistent application of access policies, minimize the chances of human error, and significantly enhance efficiency. This degree of automation not only boosts security but also allows your IT team to concentrate on more strategic initiatives, ultimately strengthening your organization’s security posture and agility.


Enhanced Visibility and Reporting

The ideal solution should offer superior reporting capabilities, providing customizable reports and real-time dashboards that deliver clear insights into access patterns and potential risks. By utilizing advanced analytics, these solutions can automatically flag unusual activities and identify possible threats in complex environments. This proactive approach allows you to recognize and address risks before they become major issues. Comprehensive reporting not only ensures compliance but also simplifies audits and aids in informed decision-making regarding access policies. These are critical advantages in a digital environment where traditional tools are insufficient.


Cross-Application Risk Management

If you're running multiple critical business applications alongside NetSuite, you need a solution that provides a unified view of access risks across all platforms. Advanced access governance solutions offer this comprehensive perspective, addressing the cross-application security implications that basic tools can't handle. This holistic approach allows you to identify and manage risks that may arise from the interaction between different systems, ensuring that your security measures are truly comprehensive.

By providing a single pane of glass for all your access governance needs, these solutions enable you to maintain consistent security policies across NetSuite and your entire IT ecosystem, reducing complexity and enhancing your security posture.


Quantitative Benefits of Advanced Access Governance

Advanced access governance solutions can yield significant returns on investment in the following ways:


  • Reduce audit costs by up to 22% through automated controls and reporting
  • Decrease the risk of fraud by 84% with improved segregation of duties management
  • Improve operational efficiency by 63% through streamlined access management processes
  • Reduce the time spent on access reviews by 78%, freeing up valuable resources


Addressing Specific Pain Points


SaaS Sprawl

Managing SaaS sprawl, the uncontrolled proliferation of cloud applications connected to your NetSuite environment poses significant security and compliance risks. Access governance solutions can help manage and mitigate these risks with:


  • Centralized visibility: Identify and monitor all SaaS applications in use across the organization.
  • Automated access management: Streamline provisioning and de-provisioning of user access to multiple SaaS apps
  • Enforcing least privilege: Ensure users only have access to the resources necessary for their current role across all SaaS applications.
  • Compliance monitoring: Maintain audit trails and generate reports to demonstrate compliance across your SaaS ecosystem


Research shows that the average enterprise uses over 1,000 cloud services, many of which are not known to IT teams. By managing SaaS sprawl, you can significantly minimize shadow IT, enhance security, and maintain control throughout your entire SaaS ecosystem.


Managing "Ghost" Accounts

Ghost accounts or inactive user accounts that remain in NetSuite pose a significant security risk. Access governance solutions can help identify and manage these accounts:


  • Automatically detect inactive accounts: Identify accounts that haven't been used for a specified period
  • Streamline de-provisioning: Automate the process of revoking access for departed employees or contractors
  • Regular policy-based access reviews: Conduct periodic access reviews to ensure all active accounts are still valid


Studies show that 58% of companies have over 1,000 inactive user accounts, creating potential security vulnerabilities. Addressing ghost accounts can significantly reduce the surface of your attack and improve your security posture.


Balancing Innovation with Risk Management

For organizations looking to innovate while maintaining strong security controls, access governance solutions offer:


  • Flexible policy management: Easily adapt access policies to support new initiatives without compromising security
  • Role simulation: Test the impact of proposed changes before implementation
  • Continuous monitoring: Detect and respond to potential security violations in real-time, allowing for agile innovation within a secure framework


By implementing these capabilities, you can reduce the time to execute new initiatives while maintaining strong security controls.

As you work through the complexities of cloud ERP systems, regulatory requirements, and security challenges, enhancing your approach to access governance is key. By supplementing NetSuite’s built-in security features with targeted solutions, you can improve your security framework, optimize your workflows, and maintain ongoing compliance within your NetSuite environment.

Take Control of Your NetSuite Security Today. Don't let access governance challenges compromise your organization's data integrity and compliance. Explore SafePaaS to enhance your NetSuite environment and safeguard your business.

Contact us to learn how we can help you implement effective access governance strategies tailored to your needs.