In the standard SAP system, there are many authorization fields that are not declared as organizational levels, but instead characterized by special values. But the more authorization fields without organizational levels that contain organization-specific values like location or country, the larger the proportion of special roles grows.
However, to achieve the greatest possible transparency in role administration and avoid unnecessary authorizations – not least with system security in mind – the creation of additional special roles should be avoided wherever possible.
The authorization structures at many companies have grown organically. Over the course of time, users have often been granted wider authorization privileges than they actually need for their everyday work. As a result, data availability and integrity, as well as system availability, can be critically endangered. Authorization managers see an increasing need for action to minimize the risk of SAP security incidents. After all, many more IT incidents still remain unreported compared to published cases.
Seize the opportunity to take your SAP S/4HANA migration to a new level with a cleanly designed, holistically planned security and compliance strategy. After all, having structured plans from the start will reduce the workload in the long term. That’s why you should ultimately see this challenge as an opportunity as well: to improve the security of your SAP systems, streamline your role concepts, and enable use of the new system with all its benefits.
Technical SAP users that have extensive authorizations like SAP_ALL pose a heightened security risk. Vulnerabilities can endanger interfaces and paralyze processes. As such, external auditors are intensifying their focus on authorization management. One of our customers – a company in the energy sector – recently faced the challenge of having to restrict the authorizations of its technical users (batch processing/RFC interfaces).
One of our long-standing customers, the largest forklift manufacturer in Europe, uses the SAST SUITE for its SAP authorization management alongside a variety of IT services from akquinet AG. As part of a compliance project, the SAST Consulting team was commissioned to redesign and re-engineer all SAP authorizations for nearly 900 users in Germany. In this guest commentary from Sascha Heckmann, together with external SAP consultant Bernhard Radermacher, he tells how the “Ticket Monitor” a custom-developed add-on for the tried and tested SAST Safe Go-Live Management helped the project become a full success.
A municipal utility company recently implemented a new authorization concept to optimize maintenance, transparency, and user access. The implementation process included an assessment of whether all the existing user master records were really necessary. A major project like implementing a new authorization concept often pays for itself when inactive user master records are classified and restricted, reducing license fees as a result.
The upgrade from SAP ERP to SAP S/4HANA also involves a changeover to a new technology. This offers new possibilities thanks, to the increased speed of the SAP HANA in-memory database, as well as an improved user experience through the new FIORI UI. At the same time, however, the implementation of SAP S/4HANA also presents many enterprises with the difficult challenge of planning and executing their migration projects correctly: existing processes and role concepts have to be reconsidered.
The SAP S/4HANA software suite represents a cutting-edge cornerstone for the digitalization of enterprises and is increasingly being used by both SMEs and large corporations. However, the implementation of and migration to SAP S/4HANA also entail increasing complexity in system administration and management. Our specialized software tools enable you to master this project successfully.
When setting up an SAP S/4HANA system landscape, you have the option of establishing a front-end system as the central, superordinate system that accesses different back-end systems. To do this, you have to consider and logically design many factors in advance. In addition to the technical prerequisites, the role and authorization concepts have to be revised. But how can you adapt authorization management in an SAP S/4HANA system with little effort?
Companies that use SAP are required to describe controls and procedures in documents that reflect the current status of the system and the general compliance guidelines. The concepts for framework and application authorizations are essential elements of this documentation, for both internal requirements and annual reviews by external auditors. Good documentation templates can help get you where you need to go much more quickly.