Security Strategies for Managers to Mitigate Threats in Mixed SAP Architectures

In today's digital landscape, the dominant model for SAP landscapes is the hybrid environment, which distributes workloads and data across local data centers, private clouds, and platforms like AWS or Azure. This hybrid approach, however, brings forth a unique set of challenges, particularly when it comes to security.

The hybrid model is not a temporary solution but the result of a long-term strategy, driven by factors such as data sovereignty requirements and the necessity to continue operating existing legacy systems. However, this strategy complicates incident response as an attack can traverse multiple environments, requiring updates to the incident response plan to include procedures for investigating and containing threats that cross over from on-premise environments to the cloud (or vice versa).

One of the biggest challenges is maintaining inconsistent security policies between on-premises and cloud environments, leading to security gaps. To address this, a resilient strategy treats the entire hybrid landscape as a single, interconnected environment, establishing a unified security baseline, centralizing identity management, and integrating threat monitoring across all platforms.

In a hybrid SAP deployment, traditional security assumptions no longer apply, and executives must grapple with several different challenges that arise from managing SAP systems in these fragmented landscapes. A policy that works in an on-premises operation may be ineffective in the cloud, and connections between the system worlds create new, often unmonitored attack surfaces.

Managing a single, consistent user identity in a hybrid world is incredibly difficult, often resulting in complex identity and access management issues. To tackle this, organizations must centralize identity and access management, creating a single identity for each user through a central identity provider (IdP).

Data in a hybrid environment is constantly on the move, exchanged between local systems and the cloud. This movement poses risks of data interception during transmission and data exfiltration risks in the cloud environment. A comprehensive security approach is necessary to secure all system connections and interfaces in a hybrid environment, including end-to-end encryption, strong authentication, network firewalls, and segmentation.

The biggest blind spot for security teams in a hybrid SAP environment is typically the SAP application layer, often overlooked in favor of securing the infrastructure and network connections. To close this visibility gap, businesses must integrate monitoring into a central Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) system, enabling a unified view of security events across different environments.

The Onapsis platform provides unified security for hybrid SAP systems by evaluating all SAP systems against the same security policies and threat information, and monitoring for threats. This platform bridges the gap between on-premises and cloud-based systems, ensuring a consistent approach to security in the hybrid environment.

In conclusion, securing hybrid SAP environments requires a comprehensive, unified approach that treats the entire landscape as a single, interconnected environment. By establishing a unified security baseline, centralizing identity management, and integrating threat monitoring across all platforms, businesses can mitigate the risks associated with the hybrid model and ensure the security of their SAP systems.