And why it is more important than ever before
These days businesses and core their processes rely heavily on IT systems and the data in these systems. In an ever-changing world, it is therefore important to keep pace and protect those systems and data. Even more so since the COVID pandemic has accelerated the digitalization of organizations.
Keeping complex SAP system landscapes secure is a difficult task and assessing these systems cannot be done manually anymore. Hardening SAP systems (vulnerability management) require detailed security knowledge that is scarce. In addition, manual checking an SAP system for vulnerabilities would take up too much time.
This is where a process-guided way-of-working can help. The process that addresses these topics is called vulnerability management. Vulnerability management is a process that discovers and categorizes security vulnerabilities or misconfigurations on the OS, DB and applications and reports on these security vulnerabilities.
This process has always been important, but is even more important nowadays for the following reasons:
A move of on-premise SAP systems to the cloud.
This is often seen as an upgrade towards better security, but as a customer, you are responsible for pretty much everything around the security of your application and in the case of a simple lift-and-shift move, nothing is really improved security-wise.
In addition, this migration might have introduced new risks as many customers have hybrid scenarios where new communication routes are needed via the internet to connect on-premise systems to systems in the cloud.
The delay of security related improvement projects
Projects like cloud migration often lead to patches being applied less frequently or a stop of hardening activities during this cloud transition.
As mentioned above, the COVID pandemic has accelerated some processes, one not yet mentioned is an increased trend of working from home. This trend has introduced new vulnerabilities or has enlarged existing ones since this trend has the effect that more SAP systems are made accessible to reach them from home. Not always in the most secure setup to facilitate that. This makes it more important than ever to make sure these systems are secure as the attack base increases by doing so.
Ransomware
Ransomware is a more recent phenomenon that cripples business by exploiting weaknesses and vulnerabilities in companies’ employees and systems. Not just by encrypting all important files, but often accompanied by threats to release obtained data to the public. This threat asks for a more stringent way to deal with vulnerabilities; a proper vulnerability management process as it can play a big role in the prevention of ransomware.
Lack of SAP vulnerability scanning tools
Identifying vulnerabilities in an IT infrastructure is a manual and labour-intensive effort. Therefore, many organisations implement vulnerability management tooling to scan for these vulnerabilities. Already for many years, there are solutions that do so on the operating systems-, database, and network layer of your IT infrastructure. However, these solutions typically are not sap-aware and don’t offer you the insight needed on SAP application level. That is the reason why in many organizations SAP risks are still a blind spot!
Protect4S vulnerability management for SAP
What is needed to address SAP specific vulnerabilities, is a solution that:
- provides insight in the vulnerabilities across your sap landscape,
- that helps you to focus on the most important vulnerabilities,
- that helps you in mitigation of this risk and
- that is automated as much as possible.
This is exactly what the Protect4S vulnerability management solution was developed for. Based on decades of SAP expert knowledge and aimed to be completely integrated into an organisation’s vulnerability management process. Providing you with practical step-by-step solutions for involved teams like your basis team, authorizations team, etc.
Do you want insight into the state of security of your SAP landscape? Let us know and we’re keen to show you how easy and insightful that can be. Helping you towards a more secure SAP landscape, towards a more secure way of doing business.
