A county treasurer's office wants stronger day-to-day security operations around privileged work. Which control set best addresses conflicting duties and elevated accounts?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation
One person who both writes the check and hides the books is a classic problem — split the duties, rotate the hot seats, and keep admin accounts on a short leash. Honor the security SLAs you promised. Unchecked combo roles and blind trust are how fraud and outages sneak in.
Full Explanation
Sustainable municipal security operations separate conflicting duties, rotate sensitive roles, tightly manage privileged accounts, and honor agreed security service levels. Segregation of duties prevents a single person from both authorizing and implementing high-risk changes or from controlling an entire financial path without detection. Periodic rotation of sensitive roles reduces concentration of power and can surface undocumented processes. Privileged account management—vaulting, just-in-time access, session recording, and rapid revocation—limits standing admin risk. Security SLAs for ticket response, vulnerability remediation, and incident handling set expectations with business and citizen-facing services so security work is measurable rather than aspirational.
Combining change approval and production deploy into one unchecked role forever recreates classic fraud and error paths and weakens change integrity. Never reviewing privileged sessions because trust is assumed after hire ignores insider threat and compromised-credential scenarios that cities routinely face. Ignoring service-level agreements for security ticket response times allows critical findings to age without accountability. Exam caveat: segregation must be risk-based—small towns may use compensating monitoring when full role split is impractical, but compensating controls must be real. Operationally, maintain a SoD matrix for IT and finance-adjacent roles, vault break-glass credentials, rotate on-call lead duties, and report SLA attainment to the CISO monthly.