8 Ways to Save Time and Money - Part 8: Security Audit

Last, but surely not least, on my list of 8 ways to save time and money is the pesky security audit. You might chalk it up to that Master Card commercial again. Another way to think of it is that you probably don't want to find out the hard way that you are not compliant with your licensing or that your business is at risk for leaking important or even confidential information.

Every organization needs to balance its users' technology needs — speed, ease of use and convenience — against the critical need to keep information safe and secure against a variety of sophisticated threats and potential liability. This is why every organization needs to perform information technology audits.


One of my coworkers has written an article about how to avoid risks when selected a technology service provider. You can read that article here.

If you are using Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 you can run the Named user license report found in the System administration module. The report contains a list of users and their assigned security roles. You can also use this report to analyze the duties and privileges of each user. You can read a detailed blog article about this here

Be sure to run the periodic job found in the Inquiries area of System administration before running this report. This job populates data in a series of tables, you can query those tables directly to generate more detailed reports about your security in any version of Dynamics AX.

Another great option in AX 2012 is to keep track of what changes are being made to your security role assignments. Here is a great blog that explains how you can do this in Dynamics AX.

Also, if you are running AX 2012 R2, be aware that there are some hot fixes that you may need to apply in order comply with the MS licensing guide. You can read more about this issue and how to apply the hot fix here.

In the current release of Dynamics 365 for Operations the Named user license report no longer exists. Part of this is because the licensing model is still a bit of a moving target. You best bet is to work closely with your Partner to ensure you are compliant. And, be on the look out for a new report coming in the future from Microsoft. 

If you need help completing a security audit you can read more about my companies service offerings here.

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