An ERP softwares brings together all the business processes of your enterprise into a single database. It basically helps manage, organize and plan your resources, be it materials, employees, or even customers. An ERP software can be considered a combination of HRMS, CRM, and MRP. Starting as Manufacturing Resource Planning, designed to coordinate between departments to effectively manage the production, ERP now is a complete database of all your business information. ERP today deals with production to sales, including employee and customer management.
Keeping all your data in one place, with multiple employees accessing the information to coordinate between the functions, is definitely not without risk. Various security measures must be taken in order to reduce the information breach and security risks. While the new changes in the software deployment like the cloud systems have been opted by businesses, considering its low investment and infrastructure requirements, all these come with a price of security risk.
Should that mean you must avoid migrating your business to ERP software? Definitely not. We cannot imagine the future of business without technological changes. Forgetting topping the race, you are not even considered in the race if you are still a technological virgin as a business. So the question now is to reduce the security risk while working on ERP software.
We can look at a few common ERP security risks and the ways to deal with them.
Delayed Updates
Delaying the updates of the softwares and modules can run the risk of security crashes and similar issues to be more difficult to rectify. Most updates apart from new features are also dedicated to fixing the software malfunction and other similar security risks that might lead to a breach of data or loss of data. So not updating at a time can cause unexpected malfunctioning of your software and risk your business processes being affected considerably. Though cyber-attacks and external hackers are not much of a concern for most small and medium-sized businesses, loss of data or software malfunction is definitely a big risk that one must take care to avoid. Working as an integrated system of all your company data,
We must dedicate more care to the update and the need for it. Data and app migration to the latest version will involve many technical changes and would require careful action. Thus it is always helpful to discuss the migration process in detail with your service provider before deciding on migrating to a newer version.
Access rights for users
The ERP software is often multi-user interfaces and would mean that a number of employees will have access to the various resources of the company. While the security risk caused in these cases is not often intentions, the impact is not any less. For the ERP software, it is not necessary that all users have default access to all data in our database. It is not sufficient to grant overwriting rights to all users on all modules and applications. We must take care to restrict who sees what and what they can do with the information. This might include limiting some users to only read, some to write, and in a higher managerial role to read, write, create and delete. The access rights are important for internal security.
We have to make changes and manage the access rights in our database every time a change in the job title or new hire is made. Record rules, two-factor / multi-factor authentication and so on are ways to ensure internal safety. Inadequate Software Training
It does not require much professional training for the employees to manage and work with the ERP softwares today. But it does without question, that a certain amount of understanding and training is necessary for all employees to avoid mistakes while using the software. A lack of familiarity with the software and its functionality can pose big risks to the company. The innocent mistakes of new hires could cause security risks to the company.
It is always important to discuss employee training and support with your service provider. We can also access online resources and webinars offered by the service providers to help our new hires understand the ERP software they work with. Cybrosys has functional and technical blogs as well as a dedicated YouTube channel clarifying and detailing functionalities of the various versions of Odoo for your reference. We also conduct regular webinars and training on Odoo. Frankensteining of software
Similar to frankensteining in designs, fragmentation, and the combination of data across multiple software can cause an incoherent whole. The familiarity of applications might often force us to export data from the ERP used to another software to run certain functions. This duplication of data across softwares can be a security threat. Maintaining, updating, and securing these data across the softwares can be a real struggle. This often occurs due to functional shortcomings of the ERP used or due to familiarity and ease of using another software for the given purpose.
Well, the solution to this is to use ERP software that can meet your various functional and technical needs as a business. An ERP software with a minimalistic interface and advanced customization possibility can be your answer to avoid combining more softwares while you have an ERP in place.
Single authentication
Well password cracking is not that hard these days and single authentication is no more sufficient to ensure your data safety. Access to your database can risk the sensitive information of your company data that could cause considerable loss and market failures to the company. Mishandling of the database can also affect everything from production to sales, bringing your business down in no time.
Single authentication is definitely a thing of the past. Now almost all modern ERP allows us to protect our data with two-factor authentication. Enable two-factor authentication in your ERP use authentication codes to protect your data.
Notwithstanding the security risks in ERP, we definitely must keep in mind that ERP is the future of business. With the right service providers, these security risks are manageable. Choosing the right service providers for your ERP implementation and support can rid you of the various security risks that may possibly arise with the use of an ERP system. Deciding on the right ERP system and choosing the right vendor is what must be given