One of the most important aspects of running a business, especially in the modern and technological landscape is to ensure your business is secure. Data breach numbers are on the rise and with all sensitive information and data being held online, it is more important than ever to be vigilant. Sure, it is important to use proper security measures and know all about logs and log management (check out Syslog for newbies for help), but they aren’t the only thing you can do to keep your company secure.
Some of the most important parts of keeping your business secure are controlling who has access to the important information your data and company use, which is often called permission management. Without this, you could risk too many people knowing a lot of sensitive information when they don’t need to. And with human error actually being the largest cause of data breaches, you can never be too careful.
However, in addition to security in a traditional sense, it is also important for your business to remain financially secure as a business requires money to operate. Your procurement (purchasing) department is in charge of securing all of the resources your business needs, and performing regular audits in that area will ensure no fraud is taking place and could help improve the overall efficiency of the department.
With that in mind, this article is going to look at both permissions management and audit procurement and give a basic guide to each featuring helpful tips and other information to ensure your company is secure, both financially and in a traditional sense.
Permission Management
Permission management is the idea of restricting and managing which employees have access to the private information of your company or customers. See, the more people that have full access to all of the most important information, the greater the chance one makes a mistake or compromises the data in some way.
As a result, it is better to just choose a select few people who have access, in hopes of minimizing potential leaks, hacks or other issues. These people will be given special training and instruction on how to deal with this type of data and should be aware of how important this access is. Of course, there is also a chance that you can offer different levels of access, this doesn’t need to be a full access or no access type of thing. You could also have different levels of permission so certain people can actually add an edit to the information, while others will only be able to view it.
As for how to select who gains access, there are a few different models and methods that most companies use. These include:
- Attribute-based access control – rights and permission are granted based on attributes that are evaluated via policies.
- Discretionary access control – The owner of the data will be the one to determine who has permission and what level of permission they have.
- Role-based access control – This method allows access based on job title. So those in certain roles will get access while others (who don’t need access to do their jobs) won’t.
Those are a few of the most common ways that companies or data owners decide who gets to access certain information. If you want to set up or better manage who has access to what sorts of information, there are tools out there that can help you better manage who has access and much more.
Audit Procurement
The procurement department of a company is responsible for purchasing the things needed to run your business. What they are responsible for buying will depend on the type of company. Some procurement departments will purchase materials for manufacturing, while others will purchase software, hardware, and tools for the company to use.
However, just like protecting the information and data your company houses is important, it is also important to protect the funds of your company. As a result, it is important to audit your procurement department every now and then. The main goal of this audit is to ensure that everything is done by the book and to make sure the procurement team is finding you good sources of materials to keep your overall costs down. During the audit, you should check and verify all purchase orders, evaluate all of the vendors you are buying from and ensuring the quality of the purchases is high.
Another one of the most important parts of an audit on the procurement department is to ensure that no employee is acting in a fraudulent manner. Once the audit is done, be sure to provide the team with the findings so they can work on improving their operations. By auditing the procurement department, you can be sure that not only are employees taking the right steps for purchasing and are choosing affordable and efficient providers but also that no one is fraudulent and taking money from your company.
In conclusion, hopefully, this article has helped you better the permission management at your company and better audit your procurement departments. These are two very important aspects of running a successful business and shouldn’t be ignored or taken lightly.