Cloud-native platforms make it easier to manage payroll data, stop fraud, and deter cybercrime.
Companies worry that criminals are targeting their payroll data. Studies into stolen data reveal that 80% of business data breaches involve HR and payroll files. These take on different forms, from cyberattacks to payroll fraud activities, even malicious employees stealing or leaking payroll information.
Many companies are at risk because they don’t have cohesive and visible payroll data environments, says Bruce van Wyk, CEO of Deel Local Payroll.
“When payroll data is spread across several places, like spreadsheets, emails, and different computers, it’s easy to copy and steal. The company can’t track or manage that data. They won’t know if someone steals that information, and the lack of visibility also makes payroll fraud easier.”
Payroll is one of the most demanding administrative functions in a business, and has dealt with information silos and sprawl for most of its existence. But this situation changed in the past decade as cloud-native platforms provide a new data feature: the single source of truth.
One set of payroll data
The concept of a single source of truth emerged in the late 20th century. Experts recognised that data repositories should be centralised, housing clean and sorted data supported by controlled access. Initially, the focus fell on data warehouses. But cloud computing in the mid-2000s brought about a powerful evolution, namely the software platform.
“A platform is like a gated community for a family of specialised apps, workflows, and data storage,” says Van Wyk. “It securely shares information between different parts of the platform. For example, on our platform, the payroll engine securely shares payslips directly with employees through a self-service WhatsApp bot. Those are three different systems, but they work together as one, drawing from the same data source. You can also connect other business apps to this system. For example, we have customers who connect their finance software with the data from their payroll system.”
The cloud-native, multi-tenant platform is the pinnacle of this model. It lives on cloud infrastructure; users never have to install it on their devices, instead accessing it through a web portal. There are no silos, since everyone in the organisation uses the same software version. And the data resides in secure cloud storage that improves monitoring and backups.
The platform vendor maintains and upgrades the platform, providing unique, ring-fenced, and even branded versions to different clients. Individual users can access portals and forms relevant to their jobs. For example, managers can record timesheets and leave approvals directly, adding that information to the same data pool that payroll, HGR, and other departments such as finance use.
Better payroll security
Platforms give different staff direct access to the services they need and create a single data source. These features have major security benefits:
- Secure vendor storage: The most reputable platform vendors invest in data security features such as 256-bit encryption and ISO certifications, such as the ISO 27001:2022 international standard for information security management systems.
- Role-based access: Using a single platform makes it easy to define user roles and their rights, ensuring that people only access the features and data they need.
- Audit trails: A single platform can track everything that happens on it, creating logs and audit trails of all data movements and access.
- Free updates: Clients subscribed to the platform receive free feature and security updates, pushed by the vendor.
- Total data visibility: The business can see and access all of its data, which it can archive for backups, port to other systems, or share through API connectors.
- Approval workflows: Companies can use and design approval workflows that ensure nobody can edit data or make other changes without supervisor or management approval.
- Monitoring and incident response: As the platform custodian, the vendor can deploy 24/7 infrastructure monitoring with automated alerting and incident response procedures with SLA-backed escalation paths.
Ultimately, these are all benefits of a system that focuses on creating a single data source nestled inside a cloud-native platform. A business gains the advantages of reliable and visible data it controls, and enjoys the additional benefits of enhanced security.
“When all your information is scattered in different places, it makes you less productive and much harder to keep all that information safe,” says Van Wyk. “But keep it in one binder, and all that changes. A cloud-native platform does the same thing, but at a much larger scale and focused on crucial business functions. By creating a single data source through a cloud platform, you get many productivity and security advantages.”
