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Governance, Risk, Audit & Privacy · Foundational

Segregation of Duties (SoD)

Dividing critical tasks among different people so no single person can both commit and conceal errors or fraud.

Definition

SoD separates authorization, custody, recording, and reconciliation, as well as IT duties such as development and production deployment. When SoD is not feasible, compensating controls like supervisory review are used. SoD conflicts are commonly analyzed with role-based access tools.

Example

The developer who writes code cannot migrate it to production; a separate release team does.

Exam tip

SoD is a preventive control; compensating controls for small teams are often detective reviews.

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