Top Methods of Contract Access Control for Administrators

Contracts used by an organization contain all the essential details of the terms of the partnership or working relationship with another organization. All contracts carry some information or sensitive data that the organization doesn’t want to share with every employee or person having access to the contract. Thus, the application of access control becomes a necessity.

To control access through a CLM tool or software, an administrator is appointed. The Admin’s job is to control the access to various contracts used by the organization and use access control methods to filter out data access. Different teams across departments or locations may deal with different parts of the contract and thus, controlling access to the parts of the contract by different departments is necessary.

Let us understand the best practices and methods of contract access control in Enterprize CLM for different audiences.

Hierarchy based Access Control

Hierarchy based access control method includes controlling access to contracts based on the hierarchy of the organization. A contract may include different levels of information. In Hierarchy based control, a user gets access to alter or view a particular part of the contract based on their role in the organization.

For example, an executive from the legal team can only have access to the legal part of the contract, or a business team executive can only view or alter business-related provisions. The Admin whose area of responsibility encompasses multiple departments gets access to multiple parts or the complete contract.

This type of access control method ensures that different departments can work with the contract without worrying about interference from any unrelated user. This also prevents sharing of all data among different departments.

Understanding Area of Responsibility of the User

An admin must understand the different areas and their requirements. This helps in understanding the parts of the contract which are relevant to different departments. Consequently, it will help the admin in assigning contract access control for all departments. If the admin doesn’t have a clear understanding of the area of responsibility of different departments then he will have to change access control whenever a team requires more access or has access to more info than required.

An admin can use the tool to give global access to high-level management and limited access to executive-level employees. The access control must also be flexible as the roles of individuals in an organization are subject to change.

Security Considerations to Give Access

This method involves giving access as per the level of sensitivity of the information in the contract. The admin should decide whether the information shared with an individual can create a potential security risk for the organization or not. For example:

If an individual has access to any sensitive information of an organization and he is not under NDA, then he might share this info with other competitors. This could result in financial losses to the organization.

Conclusion

The access control methods are different for different types of audiences and the administrators must understand the essential requirements of audiences before employing access control. The admin access given by the organization must also be flexible enough to cater to the changes in roles of administrators. The CLM tools have the option to control access to the contracts and a clear understanding will help admins from legal or business teams to save potential security or data breach risks.