Separation of Duties (SoD)

Separation of duties, often abbreviated SoD, is an authorization and governance principle designed to prevent toxic combinations of privileges by distributing critical tasks across different individuals or controlled approval paths. It can be static, where conflicting access rights must never be assigned together, or dynamic, where conflicts are evaluated at execution time within a process. SoD controls are especially important in finance, ERP, privileged administration, identity administration, procurement, and any process involving creation, approval, execution, and reconciliation steps. Mature SoD models require clear conflict definitions, compensating controls, exception governance, and traceability. Separation of duties is also called segregation of duties: the two names describe the same control principle. Conflicts frequently span several applications, so inter-application SoD, access simulation before granting rights, and documented mitigating controls are part of a mature model.