{"id":5441,"date":"2024-09-08T14:21:57","date_gmt":"2024-09-08T18:21:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/solutionsreview.com\/security-information-event-management\/?p=5441"},"modified":"2024-09-30T10:36:48","modified_gmt":"2024-09-30T14:36:48","slug":"beyond-firewalls-enhancing-sap-security-with-granular-access-control","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/solutionsreview.com\/security-information-event-management\/beyond-firewalls-enhancing-sap-security-with-granular-access-control\/","title":{"rendered":"Beyond Firewalls: Enhancing SAP Security with Granular Access Control"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Beyond<\/p>\n

Christoph Nagy, a founding member and CEO at SecurityBridge<\/a>, discusses in depth how companies can enhance their SAP security initiatives with granular access control. This article originally appeared in\u00a0Insight Jam<\/a>, an enterprise IT community that enables human conversation on AI.<\/span><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The digital landscape is broad, encompassing personal devices such as tablets and smartphones that tap into corporate networks and the vast software stack that governs business processes. These digital assets are interconnected and visible to bad actors when their data flows. For these reasons, it\u2019s paramount to create a hierarchy of software access permissions to ensure that only trusted individuals have the ability to work with such important business processes. Regarding platforms such as SAP that touch nearly every part of a business, the importance of Access Control Lists (ACLs) can\u2019t be overstated.<\/p>\n

The Ubiquity Of SAP<\/strong><\/h3>\n

SAP stores financial, procurement, supply chain, customer, and HR information\u2014and it can\u2019t have open-access or weak cybersecurity policies. Without a thoughtful cyber defense plan, financial loss, reputational damage, and legal ramifications are possible when ransomware holds intellectual property hostage. Firewalls are traditional means of protecting the edge, but they often won’t stop a malicious actor from getting into internal systems and data repositories, like SAP systems.<\/p>\n

Firewalls: A Traditional Defense, But Not Enough for SAP<\/strong><\/h3>\n

In a typical SAP platform, interfaces like RFC (Remote Function Call) or HTTP allow users to interact with browsers and apps. It is known for its strong integration with SAP’s database and application server. This access ability is in addition to Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), which is used for accessing and maintaining distributed directory information services over an Internet Protocol (IP) network.<\/p>\n

Firewalls are not enough to secure an SAP environment. A firewall can handle traffic filtering, packet inspection, and network segmentation, but that differs from the kind of granular SAP security necessary to mitigate the risk of internal sources with access.<\/p>\n

Hardening SAP: Network-Level Security Does Not Cut IT<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Managing ACLs is an excellent method to augment firewall security because it allows for granular distinction, and it can be controlled from the SAP application level for multiple components such as:<\/p>\n