With every new security breach, the number of managers concerned about cyber security rises. Today everybody has to ask themselves: “Do my security controls keep pace with attacks?” In fact, being secured is quite similar to being healthy. There are no guarantees you will not get sick, but you definitely won’t pass away unexpectedly if you identify the issue timely.
Regular checkups and stress tests are as important for SAP systems as they are for people.
What can be done in this regard? There are many ways for you to start:
Regardless of the way you chose to follow, you will end up with a list of security issues. Your second step is quite obvious: learn from the results and start a continuous improvement cycle. The cycle implies studying the business context, prioritizing remediation activities, and tracking effectiveness.
This continuous process of security monitoring and identifying, evaluating, and mitigating vulnerabilities is called SAP Vulnerability Management. This is what you need to gain insight into SAP security and technical compliance.
The major challenges to SAP Vulnerability Management implementation are:
You know the way it works. The security analyst runs a vulnerability scan and throws pages of report over the office panel to the system administrators, SAP BASIS team, Access Control team, or ABAP developers. Some patches are missing, some do not fix the issues, or there isn’t enough time to get to them. Vulnerabilities may stay unpatched forever.
The CISO is left wondering about the meaning of those vulnerabilities to business risks, completeness of the scanning coverage, and the ability of the team to ensure protection. The CIO is puzzled by the peculiarities of the patches for the SAP platform. The CXOs are still uncertain whether it was worth the efforts at all.
The solution to this problem is quite simple. If there is a lot of parties involved, the activities are laborious and resource-demanding. You are responsible for the result, but you cannot direct all the actors – you need a business process. It will let you orchestrate the work of the actors towards the intended result: to assure the stakeholders that the SAP systems meet the target security level.
Implementing SAP Vulnerability Management in partnership with ERPScan’s Professional Services Team will let you get the most out of the ERPScan Smart Cybersecurity Platform for SAP, establish a continuous improvement cycle for the ERP security, and give a clear picture of SAP security to the board.
In a nutshell, Vulnerability Management is a process of proactive security risk management achieved through the combination of business context, vulnerability assessment results, and a uniting cross-boundary process.
Enterprises differ in their ability to adapt, in the maturity of the IT processes, and budget. However, we believe that once you have internalized the idea of the end-to-end process of SAP Vulnerability Management, you can master the control over SAP security risks originating from vulnerabilities.
As a result, you will adopt a process of continuous monitoring and improving the security of SAP systems. Each of the tasks can be outsourced and tracked efficiently.Furthermore, SAP Vulnerability Management implementation serves Compliance Management, a source of findings to show evidence of fulfilling compliance requirements.
As an outcome, you will have a documented and implemented process of SAP Vulnerability Management. It can be performed either on your own or partially outsourced.
The process will be described in the SAP Vulnerability Management process description, which includes definition of the process roles and their responsibilities, description of business activities and tasks, KPIs and SLAs.
During the execution, the process will deliver the following results:
This adaptive approach will help build your Security Team’s capabilities, which are crucial to maintaining reliability and trustworthiness of the SAP system.
You will finally assure all stakeholders that SAP systems meet the target security level: vulnerability risk is under control; technical compliance is ensured; the Security Team stays current on security threats.
This will give you a competitive advantage and put you ahead of most enterprises worldwide.
