It is our pleasure to announce support for Workday in the Obsidian CDR platform! This highly anticipated release extends Obsidian’s industry-leading unified visibility, monitoring and protection capabilities to Workday. Obsidian offers a simple solution to continuously protect Workday and other SaaS applications against breaches, attacks, and insider threats without impacting productivity. With Obsidian, security teams have the data they need to ensure that the right employees have the right access privileges to Workday and they are doing the right things with that access. This blog post provides an overview of our protection for Workday.
Your Most Sensitive Data is in Workday
Workday is the leading enterprise SaaS solution for financial and human capital management, used by organizations around the world as their solution for financial management, human capital management, and planning. Because of this, Workday holds some of the most sensitive information in an organization. This includes employee details, financial accounting, bank account details, payroll, contracts, vendor relationships, and more.
Protecting this data is a top business priority. Accidental or intentional data breaches can cause financial loss, severely erode trust, compromise business secrets, and trigger steep penalties under regulations such as GDPR and CCPA. Not surprisingly, attacks in the cloud are on the rise. Attackers are sending targeted malware phishing email to customers impersonating Workday. According to the latest Verizon DBIR report, 37% of all breaches involved stolen credentials and 22% involved phishing. 30% of the breaches involved an insider.
Security teams need to defend their Workday environments against insider threats, compromised accounts, data leakage, insufficient security awareness, and service misconfigurations in this time of heightened security threats.
Security Challenges
SaaS applications are simple to deploy and operate, yet security of SaaS applications is anything but simple. Let us look at some of the key challenges in securing Workday:
- Lack of Visibility: Workday is typically bought and managed by the finance or HR department. Security teams often don’t even have access to the data they need to monitor access and activity.
- Data Risk: SaaS applications like Workday give users the power to easily share, and potentially overshare, sensitive data with others. Without continuous monitoring, this increases the risk of insider threats and data breaches.
- Inadequate Detection Capabilities: Even the best security teams find it difficult to keep up with evolving threats in the cloud. Continuously monitoring activity for signs of compromise and attacks is time-consuming and laborious.
- Poor IAM Hygiene: Weak authentication practices (e.g., use of basic authentication, users bypassing MFA) create gaps in protection. Admin sprawl is rampant. Excessive admin privileges further increase the risk of compromise.
- Lingering Access: Workday also has valuable data about employee status, start and end dates, and team changes, that can provide relevant context for an identity-centric security model. Security solutions need to be able to correlate Workday human capital management (HCM) events in the context of other activity in SaaS applications. For example, Employees who have left the company may still have lingering access to SaaS applications (not just Workday). In some cases, these employees may access services after termination. This is a serious security issue.
Workday Security with Obsidian
In order to protect against breaches, insider threats, and data exposure, security teams must first have visibility. They must ensure that SaaS applications are configured properly and are being used appropriately according to security best practices. Obsidian delivers a simple yet powerful security solution for SaaS applications based on a new approach called cloud detection and response (CDR). With Obsidian, security teams can continuously monitor user activity, protect against data breaches, and detect and respond to insider threats and account compromise.
To do this, Obsidian connects with Workday and other SaaS applications like Salesforce, Microsoft 365 (previously Office 365), G Suite, and Box to seamlessly aggregate data about accounts, privileges and activity. The platform normalizes and analyzes the data using machine learning and expert analysis to detect account compromise, insider threats, access misuse, data leaks, excessive privileges and weak posture. Security teams have unified access to activity data across Workday and other SaaS applications to investigate and respond to incidents.
Obsidian’s Workday integration lets security teams not only monitor who is using the service but how they are using it. Obsidian generates insights and alerts related to a variety of risks and threats:
- Users with excessive administrative privileges
- Former employees and contractors with lingering access
- Suspicious or inappropriate access, such as an unusually high volume of downloads
- Data oversharing or exposure
- Employees with upcoming termination dates behaving suspiciously
- Accounts showing signs of compromise
- Use of weak authentication practices
Obsidian’s integration with Workday not only provides visibility, monitoring, and protection for Workday, but also uses HCM data from Workday to improve overall security of other SaaS applications.
Obsidian is delivered as a SaaS solution and doesn’t require installing any software or agents. Customers can start in minutes with API-based connectivity and get instant visibility and security insights into their Workday environments. With Obsidian, security teams have access to the data they need for continuous monitoring without getting into the live Workday environment and impacting business users in any way.
Start Exploring Obsidian for Workday
We continue to build deep integrations with leading SaaS applications and security products like Okta and CrowdStrike to simplify security in a cloud-first world. In a follow-up blog post, we will get into specific security capabilities that Obsidian offers Workday customers.
In the meantime, we leave you with the following resources to learn more about Obsidian for Workday:
- Visit the solution page at https://www.obsidiansecurity.com/workday-security to read about use cases and capabilities.
- Sign up for a 1:1 demo or drop us a note at contact@obsidiansecurity.com.
- Download the whitepaper on leveling up SaaS security with cloud detection and response.