Critical Need for SAP Security in Modern Enterprises

Critical Need for SAP Security in Modern Enterprises

Importance of SAP Security: SAP systems are the backbone of many enterprises globally, managing multiple business critical processes such as ERP, supply chain, and customer relationship, financials & others. Given the complexity and criticality of these operations, SAP security is paramount to prevent sophisticated cyber threats that target sensitive data and disrupt business functions.

Consequences of Inadequate Security:

• Advanced Persistent Threats (APT): Lead to stealthy, long-term cyber espionage campaigns, resulting in data exfiltration and intellectual property theft.
• Systemic Risk: Lead to cascading failures across interconnected business processes, causing widespread operational disruption.
• Compliance Violations: Lead to compliance breaches and other regulatory frameworks, exposing businesses to severe financial penalties and reputational damage.

Recent Security Incidents:

• Global Retail Giant: Security misconfigurations enabled attackers to bypass authentication controls, leading to unauthorized data access and a subsequent multi-million-dollar legal settlement.
• Large Financial Institution: A zero-day exploit in the environment resulted in significant downtime, severely impacting their financial operations and customer trust.

Common Threats: 

Majorly include exploitation and fraud, risks to data integrity, unauthorized network access, and data leaks. Implementing strong security postures and continuous, automated auditing and security monitoring of SAP systems/applications can address these risks. 

SAP Security Challenges to Businesses

• Insecure Data Transmission Protocols

SAP deployment consists of multiple components such as business applications, servers, gateways, network, cloud/s and and other associated systems. These systems use data transmission protocols and many of these use stored login credentials that are not encrypted and have no basic security controls.

• Intricate Operational Landscapes

SAP environments at times bring along intricate operational systems as there are multiple components, each with its own login credentials, users tend to reuse passwords. By compromising one password, attackers can get access to multiple sensitive systems. Even when single sign-on (SSO) is enabled, password logins are still allowed.

• SOC Integration Gaps

Organizations nowadays are setting up “Security Operations Center (SOC)” that monitors IT systems for security breaches, but in most business cases, SAP applications are not integrated with the SOC and are managed as a silo by internal IT teams. In addition, the Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) systems are not configured to monitor logs because they use special, proprietary formats.

• Custom Code development

Custom code development, reporting, and transaction creation are common in every SAP system. Due to complexities, SAP developers often neglect secure coding practices, and their code is rarely tested for security vulnerabilities. This lapse can leave critical applications vulnerable to ransomware, malware, unauthorized access, and other malicious threats.

• On-Premises and Cloud environments

As emerging technologies are adopted, the attack surface of SAP systems expands. Today, most SAP users operate in hybrid environments that combine on-premises and cloud solutions, adding layers of complexity to security management.

Key SAP Security Best Practices

1. Roles, Authentications and Authorizations

All SAP systems incorporate authentication and authorization, with a strong emphasis on upholding the principle of separation of duties (SoD) in mission-critical environments. It is crucial to avoid assigning combinations of permissions that could allow any individual to perform potentially harmful actions, such as escalating their own access rights. The only exception to this is the use of “firefighter accounts,” which are temporarily granted broad permissions for urgent maintenance tasks and must be promptly revoked afterward.

In large SAP environments, ensuring the SoD principle is upheld can be complex. To maintain compliance, continuous, automated reviews of SAP authorizations are necessary. This can be achieved through advanced customization of SAP’s built-in tools or by leveraging third-party Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) solutions.

2. Secure Patch Management

Traditional security systems address threats that are also relevant to SAP systems, including known vulnerabilities, zero-day vulnerabilities, and the necessity for regular security updates. The primary challenge for most SAP teams lies in identifying which patches are required, ensuring they are kept up to date, and applying them consistently. Due to the labor-intensive nature of this process, many SAP systems remain unpatched for extended periods, thereby increasing the risk of potential vulnerabilities.

3. Secure Coding

Secure coding is crucial for establishing a secure SAP environment. Developers are responsible for ensuring their code is secure and for maintaining a secure software development lifecycle. Often, security best practices are overlooked while code is still on a developer’s machine or within a development environment. Utilizing code scanning or inspection tools is vital for providing developers with prompt feedback on potential vulnerabilities in their code and transports, and for guiding them on how to address these issues.

4. Bridging SAP Systems and SIEM Solutions

Once the fundamentals of SAP security are established, organizations can enhance their security by integrating SIEM to exceed basic compliance requirements. Typically, SAP security tools and traditional SIEM solutions operate in separate silos, creating gaps in visibility for the SOC. It’s crucial to integrate SAP security monitoring with a centralized SIEM to ensure comprehensive visibility and protection across both SAP and non-SAP environments.

In practice, integrating SAP systems with standard SIEM solutions can be challenging due to their use of non-standard logging and communication protocols. Some SIEM solutions offer specialized plugins for SAP applications, while another option is to use SAP’s own SIEM solution, SAP Enterprise Threat Detection (described below), which can then integrate with a centralized SIEM.

SAP Security Solutions

The primary defense layer for these security solutions is the system backend, where administrators can implement security policies, establish roles, and configure access controls. Each SAP solution has unique security features and considerations, with differing requirements for cloud-based versus on-premises deployments.

Beyond basic system administration and solution-specific security, SAP also offers a range of dedicated security products to further safeguard and protect your SAP environment.

Cloud Identity Access Governance

SAP Cloud Identity Access Governance is a cloud-based solution designed to enhance governance across a select range of SAP solutions. It includes features such as continuous access analysis, user assignment optimization, pre-configured audit reports, and more.

Key Features:

• Access Compliance Management:
• Perform ongoing analytics and use real-time insights to ensure access compliance.
• Utilize predefined and customizable access policies and rules.
• Adapt user access dynamically as business requirements evolve.
• Intelligent Assignment Optimization:
• Accurately assign user access.
• Identify critical issues with a dashboard interface, visual indicators, and analytics.
• Adjust access and manage risks with guided remediation.
• Extended Risk Management and Control:
• Apply access controls to all users and applications across any devices.
• Facilitate monitoring and risk remediation for separation of duties (SoD) and security in both on-premises and cloud environments.
• Simplify compliance management with ready-to-use audit reports.

SAP Enterprise Threat Detection

SAP Enterprise Threat Detection (ETD) uses SAP HANA to manage high-volume security events in real time, offering insights for anomaly detection and attack neutralization to protect against data breaches.

Key Features:

• Log Correlation and Analysis:
• Analyze and correlate extensive log data across SAP systems.
• Uncover unknown attack variants and integrate with third-party systems.
• Automated Threat Detection and Alerting:
• Detect known attack patterns and set detection rules without coding.
• Alert security teams and integrate with other security systems.
• Integration with SAP Solutions:
• Monitor threats at the application server and database levels.
• Integrate seamlessly with SAP solutions across the IT environment.

SAP Data Custodian Enhances Data Security

SAP Data Custodian enhances transparency and trust in public cloud environments by providing detailed security information for cloud users.

Key Features:

Policy Creation and Enforcement:

• Establish geolocation policies to manage data lifecycles, access, processing, storage, and movement.
• Easily update policies to adapt to evolving regulatory requirements across different regions.

Data Visibility, Alerting, and Reporting:

• Track data access, storage, and movement within the public cloud.
• Alert users to policy and data violations.
• Receive near-real-time risk and compliance reports.

Independent Encryption Key Management:

• Retain full control over encryption data and keys independently from cloud providers.
• Ensure separation of encryption keys to reduce the risk of data breaches and unauthorized data exposure.

SAP GRC: Enhancing Control and Trust

SAP Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) encompasses a suite of solutions designed to manage enterprise resources while minimizing risk, enhancing trust, and reducing compliance costs. Solutions like SAP Risk Management, SAP Process Control, and SAP Audit Management automate GRC processes, enhance control and visibility, monitor and enforce risk management, and provide an integrated technology platform for comprehensive GRC management.

SAP Identity Management

SAP Identity Management manages the full lifecycle of user identities. It enables administrators to control system access, offers self-service password management for role configuration, and provides centralized reporting for compliance.

• Key Features:
• Connectivity for On-Premises or Hybrid Deployments:

• Integrate with SAP S/4HANA and other third-party applications.
• Work with SAP Cloud Identity Services for hybrid environments.
• User Provisioning and Workflow:

• Streamline user access and assignment with business policies.
• Provision business partners and employees efficiently.
• Enable self-service password management across systems.

SAP Information Lifecycle Management (ILM)**

• SAP Information Lifecycle Management (SAP ILM) helps manage, block, and delete sensitive data, essential for compliance with regulations like GDPR and CCPA.

Key Features:

• Data Management and Archiving:

• Manage large data volumes and move old data to cost-effective storage.
• Ensure easy access to archived data.
• Retention Management:

• Support data lifecycle management for both structured and unstructured data.
• Create data management policies and track storage, retention, and deletion.
• System Shutdown:
•  Decommission legacy systems and consolidate data into a central store.
•  Access data after system decommissioning and ensure on-demand retrieval.

SAP Security with Cywarden

Managing security across multiple SAP instances can be complex, time-consuming, and manual. Without adequate security measures, companies risk exposing themselves and their customers to threats that could lead to system outages, data loss, or financial fraud.

With Cywarden, organizations using SAP can automate many security processes, providing comprehensive protection across their SAP landscape. 

• Vulnerability Scanning: Conduct scheduled or on-demand scans of thousands of rules across SAP instances to identify critical vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, missing patches, and other risks that need addressing.
• Threat Detection and Response: Detect and respond to unusual behaviors in real-time to remediate threats and minimize risk exposure.
• Code Scanning: Analyze custom code and transports for performance issues or malicious code that could lead to data loss or affect system performance.
• Compliance Reporting: Continuously monitor and report on key controls related to application configuration, IT general controls, and other compliance requirements.

Today, enterprises must prioritize SAP security as part of their broader cybersecurity strategy. Cywarden helps & offers comprehensive multi-cloud security services, integrating advanced threat detection, real-time monitoring, and robust incident response tailored for SAP environments on platforms like AWS, GCP, and Azure.

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