The Workday Security Model: What You Need To Know

2005 marked Workday’s debut as a software vendor with its Human Capital Management module. In later years, Workday Financial Management was added to the suite. Although Workday has achieved success with its Human Capital Management side, it has taken the company long and hard work to make its financial software competitive with other ERP systems through outlining, analytics, and budgeting features.

Providing cloud-based enterprise applications for finance and human resources, Workday is now a market leader. Some of world’s biggest companies, colleges, and government agencies are using this cloud-based ERP solution for managing their operations.

What is Workday Security?

Customer data security is always a top priority. Using stringent security measures at the organisational, architectural, and operational levels, Workday enables you to secure data, applications, and infrastructure. Leveraging Workday Security best practices ensures that the data is never compromised or misused.

We can broadly divide the Workday security model into two categories:

• Domain security policy
• Business process security policy

Workday Domain Security Policies:  A set of rules that determine which security groups can view and modify data in a particular domain.

• Using workday domain security policies, clients can allow access to related objects such as reports, integrations, and tasks without needing to navigate object by object (you can browse domain policies by using the search prefix ‘domain:’).
• Adding/removing security groups from domain security policies is straight forward. They are logically grouped by Functional Area. The Workday delivered report “Domain Security Policies for Functional Area” is useful for viewing the existing configuration of any domain.
• Each domain could be made up of several subdomains, which will give an organisation a better control over data. For instance, “Person Data: Home Contact Information” is a parent domain, having subdomains like “Person Data: Home Phone” and “Person Data: Home Email”.
• A user needs the security permissions to edit domain security policies, which is the “Security Configuration” domain within the “System” functional area.
• An individual can be assigned only View permissions, so the data is viewable but cannot be altered. The policies can be further organised by Modify, Get, Put, and View permissions.

Workday Business Process Security Policies: Specific rules regulating which security groups can participate in a business process, how they can participate, and what their roles are.

• The concept of workday business process security policy pertains to a group of users. They govern access to objects and steps in business processes. Apart from delivered security groups, custom security groups can be developed.
• Users have different permissions for doing different things when processing actions in Workday based on business process security policies.
• As an example, an HR Analyst might initiate (start) a promotion for a worker. This process will then be approved (approved) by the Compensation Administrator.
• A report “Business Process Security Policies for Functional Area” can be used to view the existing configurations and edit permissions, or you can select the Related Actions of an open Business Process.

Learn how Workday Security reflects the integration of these two policies:

Domain security policy controls the data and Business Process security policy controls the transactions. The user must have access both to the domain and subtasks within the business process in order to complete a specific task within Workday. Workers’ Security Profiles control what they can see in Workday. One can produce best results by leveraging workday domain security policy and workday business process security policies together.

Having decade long experience in Workday ERP tool, the team at UpperHandOps is accomplished in designing Workday Security framework as your business needs. We are acquainted with Workday Security best practices and follow them to ensure that your data is intact. With UHO Workday Security services, you can rest assured that your operations are in trusted hands. Reach out to us, and see us transform your business into a success story!