5.3 Segregation of duties
Requires duties and areas of responsibility that would conflict if held by one person to be separated, limiting the scope for undetected error, fraud or abuse of privilege.
5
artefacts
1
held by a system
2
at each review
hard
to go live
Policy repository / GRC workspace
where the evidence lives
teal = a system already holds it · olive = produced at each review
system holds itEvidence a system already holds
- System configuration or role definitions demonstrating conflicting duties cannot be combined in one account · Identity provider / directory
periodic reviewEvidence produced at each review
- Records of compensating controls, and their approval, where segregation is not practicable because of the size of the organisation · Policy repository / GRC workspace
- Evidence of periodic testing for actual segregation breaches, such as a report of users holding conflicting roles · Identity provider / directory
governing documentDocuments that govern the control
- The analysis identifying which duties and areas of responsibility conflict, covering both business and technical activities · Policy repository / GRC workspace
- The conflict matrix and how it is applied to role design and to access provisioning · Policy repository / GRC workspace
First move
Mostly documents and reviews. Pull the 1 system-held artefact from your Identity provider / directory on a schedule; put the documents under version control with an owner and review date, and log each review as a dated record with a named reviewer.
Common gaps auditors find
- Conflicts defined for finance processes only, with no equivalent analysis for administrator activity such as change approval and change implementation
- Segregation designed into roles but broken in practice by emergency or firefighter accounts that carry every entitlement
- Small organisation compensating controls asserted verbally and never documented or tested
- No detective check, so a segregation breach persists undetected between annual reviews
Do this for your whole sheet
Paste the rows you run your controls from and get this mapping for every control at once, with the periodic-review ones flagged and a first move per row. No account for the first run.
Build my evidence sheet5.2 Information security roles and responsibilities · 5.4 Management responsibilities