End-to-End security insights with SAP Application Lifecycle Management

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Even today, the security of SAP systems is often neglected. Organizations should not merely focus on whether a solution works, instead should consider on how it was made to work. Meaning, how the business requirement technically was designed, implemented and deployed.

SAP systems often form the core of an organizations business applications. This means sensitive data is stored within them and it is these that need protection. No matter what use-case, be it production, service, web shop or other any implementation scenario, SAP systems are the cornerstone for many businesses. An attack on theses systems can lead to data leaks and unintended exposure, causing not only legal and financial consequences, but also a damage in reputation. On top, new data privacy regulations such as GDPR require companies to report any leaks.

This can be averted. SAP offers a variety of tools to minimize risk. For example, you can improve your SAP operations and development security through the use of Configuration Validation (ConfVal) along with Security Baseline and Focused Insights. This allows you to represent the End-toEnd process and monitor it.

At the heart of this is SAP Solution Manager 7.2 that contains all necessary information and maintains an overview over your entire SAP landscape. Implemented correctly, it is a simple affair to check managed systems, filter for critical notes, implement these, and continuously monitor them after the initial configuration.

Configuration Validation

Configuration Validation checks the SAP systems for correct configuration. It collects and stores system parameters from all SAP systems on the central SolMan. Irrelevant of whether it is an ABAP, JAVA or critical system such as a Webdispatcher or SAP router, SolMan will tell you where you need to improve what.

Checking for system relevant Notes 

Results of system relevant Notes

SAP Security Baseline

With the help of SAP Security Baseline, ConfVal will produce relevant analytics with regard to overall system security. You can configure, generate, and evaluate reports for user rights, encryption, database security and many more topics.

Query to see if SAP* is configured correctly 

Results of SAP* configuration

Focused Insights

To easily evaluate the masses of collected data, Focused Insights, a dashboarding-tool add-on for SolMan comes into play. Focused Insights is part of the ST-OST add-on that has become free of charge this past January.

Focused Insights allow you to easily and quickly design dashboards, that are tailored to the specific use-cases: in our case, SAP system security.
Focused insights can query a number of KPIs from the Security Baseline and Configuration Validation and visualize the results.

Example dashboard

On top: Stay up-to-date with alerts

Apart from visually displaying the results from ConfVal, you can implement these into alerting and monitoring. This allows you to receive alerts by email or text message, as soon as one of the parameters fall out of the acceptable security threshold.