Advancing Security and Data Integrity in Version 2013 Release 1

By Jayesh Jain, SuiteCloud Evangelist

In NetSuite Version 2013 Release 1, quite a few features have been introduced to enhance security and data integrity. In this article, I am going to talk about some of those capabilities in detail, namely Two-Factor Authentication, executing SuiteScripts with specific roles, identifying and merging duplicates programmatically, and new audit trail capabilities for custom objects.

Enhanced Security offered by Two-Factor Authentication: In NetSuite Version 2013 Release 1, the SuiteCloud platform team added support for the market-leading two-factor authentication solution: RSA SecurID. This allows for a whole new level of security for UI access to NetSuite.

When two-factor authentication is implemented, in addition to the username and password, a user needs to provide a unique one-time password, which is the RSA SecurIDgenerated token that changes every 60 seconds. A common and popular option for hardware tokens is the RSA SecurID 700 authenticator, which is available from many RSA vendors. The NetSuite two-factor authentication module is an enterprise-class offering available to organizations of all sizes and can be used to enhance security for any role which has access to sensitive data.

Executing scripts with just adequate level of permissions: Currently, if a script requires permissions higher than those of the logged-in user, then the script has to be deployed to run as an Administrator. The NetSuite Version 2013 Release 1 introduces a new option called Execute as Role, which allows organizations to determine which role should be used to execute the script. If required, organizations can define custom roles with the exact permissions required and use that custom role to execute the script.

For example, if there is a User Event script that triggers whenever a purchase order is edited by an A/P clerk, and the script requires higher “Accountant” role permissions, then instead of granting the User Event script full administrative permissions, the NetSuite administrator can deploy the script to execute as an Accountant role.

Programmatic de-duplication: To help with data integrity, NetSuite Version 2013 Release 1 has a new set of APIs that allows companies to detect and merge duplicate entity records programmatically. Organizations may prefer performing de-duplication as a batch job using Scheduled Scripts. If organizations want to deploy specialized duplicate detection algorithms, they can opt to bypass NetSuite’s duplicate detection mechanism, implement a custom solution to find duplicates, and elect to process these duplicate records using the new merge APIs.

Here’s a code snippet to merge duplicate Contact records: (IMAGE)

New audit trail capabilities: While talking about security and data integrity, I would like to touch upon some new audit trail capabilities as well. Many customers want to know which customization changes were applied, when, and by whom so they can easily find out the source of the change when something does not perform as intended. Another use case is when customers want to perform an audit to find out the changes that were made to a particular custom record over a certain period of time. System notes are now available on select customization objects such as Custom Roles, Custom Records, Custom Fields, and Custom Lists to give customers and partners a higher level of visibility to changes made. This is a great tool for organizations with multiple account administrators or development teams.

With these and many more exciting features, the SuiteCloud platform continues to maintain the lead on security and data integrity fronts, allowing customers to conduct their business on NetSuite with confidence.