Reduce your SAP Security risks

One of the questions we often hear is:

“Is it possible to give external consultants access to my Development and Acceptance systems but scramble confidential data?” The answer is, of course, Yes!

Compliance

With GDPR, organisations have to design their IT environments with security by design as a key principle. Ensuring you don’t have Personal Identifiable Information (PII) in your systems reduce your security risk and help you to comply with legislation. Data Secure will help you safeguard sensitive information, and comply with privacy legislations. It can be used with Data Sync Manager (DSM) or on its own and is a complete data anonymisation solution to mask SAP data across your SAP landscape.

Some data-masking solutions use “in place” masking, which means that the data is masked only after it has been copied to a target system. Data Secure, on the other hand, takes security to a new level by offering you the flexibility to choose where you want to mask.

Real-time data protection

When setting up a secure SAP environment, you can operate reactively and solve any potential safety issue when it would occur. An even better option would be to avoid any potential harm already being done and work in a proactive manner - using the Data secure solution. Administrators can define the masking policies, rules and conditional behaviours in one location and it is applied across your entire SAP landscape. When data is refreshed, the policies will be checked resulting in real-time data protection – the system protects itself.

Across systems

A third aspect you should take into consideration when talking about securing your data is consistency across systems. Many companies have integrated SAP landscapes where data is distributed across ERP, CRM, SRM, and other environments. Any modification on one system needs to be consistently carried across to the other systems. Data Secure introduces a new technology, which anonymizes integrated data objects on different systems with the same values. Thus all references remain intact after scrambling.

Take the common example of protecting your HR data within your organization. You don’t want sensitive employee data to fall in the wrong hands. Data Secure uses intelligent masking to make sure that the data will still give you accurate testing results.

Highly flexible

Finally, if you want to protect your sensitive data within your system (for example: personal salaries, bank investments,...) Thanks to a library of masking options within Data Secure, most of your needs are covered. But you can extend these options even further. Any logical combination of masking behaviors can be applied to your data objects. This means that you can mix and match to produce just the right combination for your specific situation.

One more thing…

The Firefox web browser: 8 million lines of code. Microsoft Office: 44 million lines. An SAP business application contains almost 400 million lines of code. Hackers and security personnel would call this a huge ‘Attack Surface’. By removing your non-productive environment from the attack surface you already reduce your risk so your security team can focus on the productive systems.

An action that may seem obvious, but which can be crucial in your risk management approach. 🔐