Recent Developments In Data Loss Prevention

Data loss Prevention (DLP) is used to refer to a set of methods and procedures used to ensure that unauthorized users do not abuse, lose, or access confidential data. Sensitive data is defined as controlled, confidential, and business-critical by DLP software. It identifies breaches of policies identified by or within a predefined policy set by organizations usually governed by compliance with regulations such as HIPAA, PCI-DSS, or GDPR. DLP enforces remediation with alerts, encryption, and other protective measures until these breaches are detected. Data loss prevention applications and tools monitor and manage endpoint processes, filter streams of data on company networks, and track data in the cloud to secure it in motion, at rest, and in use.

Data Loss Prevention: The Three Objectives

Prevention of data loss addresses three main goals that are common challenges for many organizations:

1: Personal Information Protection/Compliance: Organizations collect and store Personally Identifiable Information (PII), Payment Card Information (PCI), or Protected Health Information (PHI). They are subject to compliance regulations that require them to protect the sensitive data of customers, such as HIPAA, GDPR, and the like. DLP defines, classifies, and tags confidential information and records the activities and events surrounding that information. In addition, reporting features provide the required data for compliance audits.

2: Data Visibility: Does the company try to achieve more data movement visibility? You can see and monitor your data on endpoints, networks, and the cloud using a robust business DLP solution. It will also help you have an insight into how individual users communicate with data within your company.

3: IP Security: DLP solutions classify intellectual property in structured and unstructured ways, using context-based classification. You may safeguard against accidental extraction of this material with the appropriate policies and controls in place.

Data Loss Prevention: Some Recent Developments

Projections indicated a global market size of $2.64 billion for data loss prevention in 2020. There are a variety of variables behind the wider adoption of DLP that have been outlined here:

1. Evolving Compliance Mandates: There is a constant evolution of global data protection legislation, and you need to be adaptable and prepared. DLP solutions provide businesses with the opportunity to adjust to changing global regulations.

2. Frequent Data Breaches: Cybercriminals and malicious insiders threaten your private data for many reasons. Corporate surveillance, personal financial gain, and political advantage may be the aim. The DLP can defend itself against all kinds of adversaries. Thousands of data breach cases and many more security incidents have occurred in the past few years. During giant data breaches, billions of documents were destroyed.

3. The Position Of The CISO: More organizations have created chief information security officer (CISO) positions. In this respect, DLP offers considerable business value and gives CISOs the requisite reporting capabilities.

4. More Places to Protect Your Data: Increased cloud usage, complicated supply chain networks, and other tools have made it more difficult to protect your information. In order to avoid sensitive data from falling into the wrong hands, knowledge of the circumstances and awareness of events surrounding your information before it leaves your company is vital.

5. More Data to Steal: Over the years, the meaning of what is confidential data has changed. Intangible assets, including pricing models and market methodologies, are now combined with sensitive data. This means there’s a lot more material for your organization to secure.

6. Stolen Data from Companies Is Worth More: The Dark Web sells stolen data as well. Individuals and organizations will buy it and use it for their own benefit. There is a strong financial motive behind data theft, with some data selling for up to a hundred thousand dollars.

7. Security Talent Dearth: With over 3.5 million unfilled security vacancies anticipated by 2021, the crisis is only getting worse. In order to fill the personnel void, managed DLP providers serve as remote extensions to the team.

The Zero-Trust Security Model: Implementation Tips

Zero-trust is a term that is widely debated in the cybersecurity industry. Almost every organization has jumped on the zero-trust bandwagon in some way over the past couple of years. A brief overview of the zero-trust concept is given here.

The Zero-Trust Security Model

The basic premise of zero-trust is that from a security perspective, you must assume that the bad actors are on your network and have access to your data, irrespective of the technologies and security measures you have in place. Since bad players are on your network, you can’t trust anyone; you need to verify what’s going on from an access perspective.

The Five Steps

You need to act across five major categories. First, the device that connects to your systems and data needs to be checked and validated. Second, you must build a contextual relationship that is user-related. Third, you need to understand and approve each application. Fourthly, you need to consider the network the user is connected to. Is it open? Is it safe? And then you need to be able to identify threats and remedy them, finally, and maybe most critically.

Zero-trust is a journey since you need to be able to do all of the above in an ongoing and compliant way. That’s not the ultimate destination. And while it could take many years for zero-trust to be fully achieved, the COVID-19 crisis has significantly accelerated this path for all organizations by moving personnel and IT infrastructures beyond any given network perimeter.

These days, workers use their mobile devices to connect to business services from home. What do you know about home networks like these? What do you know about devices that your workers use? What do you know about the security posture of those devices? What do you know about mobile applications that connect different services and systems to your organization?

Zero-trust is more critical than ever in today’s scenario of work from home. Employees could connect in a typical office setting to a network under the control of an organization. Now, all that, of course, is happening remotely. So, what is the contextual relationship you should create with your users to protect your infrastructure and data?

The Three Methods

Three different ways of achieving zero-trust are available. There is the identity-centric method, which is also very password-centric. The old network approach persists, which involves funneling everything back into a network gateway. However, since a large amount of corporate data does not pass across the corporate network, this approach is not thorough. And then there’s a mobile-centric approach, which is by far the best way to safeguard the modern ‘Everywhere Enterprise,’ where staff, IT networks, and customers are everywhere, and mobile devices provide access to all the resources. A mobile-centered approach to zero-trust security enables organizations to build trust, starting with the user’s smartphone.

Conclusion

In order to achieve zero-trust across the five key criteria mentioned earlier, organizations must first seamlessly onboard and include devices in a single endpoint management framework. Also, organizations need to ensure that all devices are secured and guided by policies that comply with their information security requirements. In addition, businesses need to allow stable cloud applications and on-site connectivity. Enterprises need to ensure safe, conditional access to ensure that only registered and compliant users, devices, and applications are given access to business resources.

Implementing Single Sign-On: Key Benefits

Users demand seamless access to multiple applications from anywhere, anytime, and on any platform as companies worldwide are increasingly migrating to the cloud. Similarly, as most large corporations have hundreds of touchpoints under different names, attempting to handle them all would definitely burden their IT departments. For customers and their IT teams, these problems enable organizations to improve their access control. That is when the implementation of Single Sign-On helps a great deal.

Single Sign-On means SSO, a one-point, holistic authentication, and access solution. With Single Sign-On, users, regardless of device, technology, or domain, are able to access a wide range of applications with a single login. To access multiple applications, you need only one set of login credentials.

Some of the big benefits of SSO for businesses are listed below.

1. Enhances Security Capabilities

One misunderstanding about using an SSO solution is that it weakens security. Although, in theory, it seems to be valid, with some wise practices, SSO can minimize password theft.

Users are more likely to develop a strong password and less likely to write it down because they are supposed to remember only one password for several applications. These best practices reduce the risk of password theft.

2. Improves Efficiency Of Staff And IT Teams

A single point of entry will minimize the usage of time and resources. A Single Sign-On enables to:

Reduce support calls: In order to access all their applications, users with only one password do not need as much assistance.

Enhance the user experience: There is no need to hop between several login URLs or reset passwords.

Mitigate security risks: Employees can use their SSO login credentials on any computer, in any web browser, without compromising security.

One of the most important advantages of Single Sign-On is the potential to maximize the productivity of end-users.

3. Enhances User Experience

One of the most significant benefits of SSO is the improved user experience. Users will appreciate a new digital experience, as repetitive logins are no longer needed. Enterprise benefits include an increase in customer satisfaction and increased rates of conversion.

4. SSO Blends Well With Risk-Based Authentication

SSO provides one “key” to use a common identity to sign in to different mobile applications, web assets, and third-party systems. You may combine SSO with risk-based authentication (RBA) to ensure a greater degree of protection. With RBA, user behavior can be monitored by your security team. Therefore, you will demand additional identity verification if you see any suspicious user activity, such as the wrong IP or multiple authentication errors. When this fails, you can prevent the user from accessing it. This powerful combination can prevent data from being stolen by cybercriminals, damaging the network, or wasting IT resources.

5. Reduces Password Fatigue

For every single application, security professionals rely on unique passwords in order to avoid cybercrime. This means the average user must recall hundreds of passwords for personal and workplace use. This leads to what is known as password fatigue. If customers have a hard time logging in, before you can convert them, they will abandon your website or app. The advantage of SSO is that there is only one password for clients to recall for all your applications.

6. Improves The Adoption Rates For Apps

Technology should simplify our lives, not lead to confusion. Making SSO sign-up or login simpler increases the likelihood of user acceptance of your applications and use of your apps.

7. Prevents Shadow IT

In the workplace, Shadow IT refers to illegal downloads. The potential for risk increases as cloud-based downloads become more common. IT administrators can use SSO to monitor what applications employees use in order to solve this issue. Identity fraud attempts can also be avoided.

It is evident from the advantages mentioned above that SSO is a must for all organizations that want to increase efficiency and improve user experience without compromising data protection.

Adopting The Zero-Trust Security Model: Key Considerations

Over the last few years, companies and customers have become increasingly dependent on digital technologies as more and more businesses migrate to the cloud and the adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) devices continues to grow. Big technology and digitalization have compelled clients to share their personal data at an unprecedented rate. Consequently, the number of organizations gathering data has increased significantly. Data is now a strategic tool for businesses and cybercriminals alike.

As businesses manage their data across different applications and environments, and users have more access to data at more interfaces, the perimeter of a network becomes porous and less defined. This causes the surface of the threat to expand as the edge becomes untenable.

Cybercriminals are moving beyond the desktop to connected devices to get to your confidential data. It is no longer sufficient for security leaders to protect their networks only on the periphery. A much more comprehensive approach to protecting the company’s network and sensitive assets is required as the perimeter lines become blurred, which means focusing on the data itself and adopting a zero-trust security model concerning data access.

Zero-trust is a fundamental shift in corporate security from a failed perimeter-centric approach to one that is data-centric. The traditional security strategy was to incorporate perimeter-based security protections with legal access to data properties and trust insiders in general. Protecting against a compromise is, however, becoming more difficult as networks and applications become more decentralized.

Although organizations have robust edge security systems in place, incidents from both inside and outside the organization also cause violations. Insider attacks can arise due to a lack of care when handling data or because the sheer number of incidents overwhelms the security teams monitoring sensitive applications. They can be difficult to detect too. Fifty-four percent of organizations have admitted that they continue to ignore security alerts while they are anxious.

The acts of a malicious insider can also cause breaches. The zero-trust paradigm does not place much emphasis on the difference between the insider and the outsider. That is to say, no one is trusted.

In a survey by The Ponemon Institute, a lack of trained security professionals stood out as a major issue. As one of the top reasons as to why they will likely have a data breach, sixty-five percent of respondents reported “insufficient in-house expertise.” Sixty percent of respondents were concerned about a breach caused by IoT devices, the survey also found. Sixty-five percent think that they will experience credential fraud because a careless employee is compromised.

Another study found that sixty-six percent of businesses are more likely to perceive malicious internal threats or unintentional breaches than external attacks, with a high percentage finding them more destructive as well. And how do you prevent an infringement from occurring on the inside? Knowing where your personal data is stored is not enough. The zero-trust model means you also know what the data is, who has access to it, and why.

Security practitioners need to take a “cradle to the grave” approach to tracking requests for data access by individuals or devices in order to fully adopt the zero-trust paradigm without influencing whether the request for access originates from within or outside the network perimeter. Through using data analytics and insight to capture a comprehensive data flow starting from the initial access request, traversing all applications and middleware, and recording what is done with the data and by whom once it is reached, it can highlight unusual trends and flag up potential threats. The zero-trust paradigm reflects a fundamentally new outlook that demands granular visibility into data access across the entire network

Real-Time ERP Data: Why Is It Important For Organizations?

Running a successful enterprise is about many different processes working in unison. You have to monitor inventory, take part in bookkeeping, ensure customers’ and workers’ satisfaction, and focus on manufacturing. Enterprise resource planning software, also known as ERP, incorporates all of these into a single centralized location, which provides access to those systems and the information they produce in real-time. If you are not using ERP software, you are missing out on several big benefits of this real-time information. Here are five benefits that you can begin to leverage by combining your business practices with ERP software.

1: Real-Time Data Streamlines Workflow

Are there areas of your business that you are not closely connected to? ERP software allows you access to data about all aspects of your business in real-time. This enables you to streamline the workflow at every stage of the process. From monitoring inventory to dealing with accounting or human resources issues, everything falls under the same umbrella. If you find a hang-up in growth or discover that your sales team is losing it, you can find inefficiencies, rectify them, and improve your overall performance.

2: Improved Order Tracking

Do you have the required information when you are called by a customer who wants to know where his order is? ERP software enables you to easily find an order so that you can give your customer information about its location. This, in turn, enables you to provide accurate predictions of delivery, meaning customers are never left wondering where their products are in the manufacturing and shipping phase.

3: Automated Profit Tracking

Estimating sales margins and profit ratios is difficult for a rising business. These reports are made readily available by the correct ERP system when synchronizing them to make it easier for you to determine metrics. With automated profit monitoring and reports, you can see places that need to be changed before they have the capacity to hurt your profit margins.

4: Prompt Customer Support

What happens when you tell a customer that you have an item in stock or that you can provide service within a set time span, only to find that you can’t? Inaccuracy affects customer support and overall brand opinion. Real-time ERP data prevents certain forms of errors from being committed, and you can see what’s available at the time of sale. This helps improve customer service and overall customer experience, which preserves your image in the eyes of your target audience.

5: Removal Of Redundancies

You can find that employees enter the same data several times as the company expands, which leads to loss of productivity and time management issues. When you have an ERP program, this dilemma is avoided. Both databases are connected, and employees can see if data that has already been registered is being entered. If a redundancy exists, the system will mark it so that you can erase it. This improves accuracy by fixing outdated data entries and eliminates time wasted.

The points mentioned above are only a few of the benefits of ERP software and the real-time data it provides. It’s time for businesses to exploit these benefits to make competitive gains.

Critical Challenges Associated With Legacy ERP Logging

ERP applications provide the most relevant information about enterprises’ financials, business reports, personally identifiable information (PII) of staff, suppliers, clients, associates, job applicants, and more. ERP systems can now be accessed from any device and any location with the introduction of corporate networking, enabling users to engage with the most important company data at any point in time.

The expansion of the spectrum of networking and access has resulted in the expansion of the network boundary that is now being extended to users and their mobile devices, establishing a new perimeter of user identity. The easiest option for malicious parties to gain access to confidential information is to compromise an end- user’s identity and ERP login credentials. Threat patterns indicate that attacks from social engineering, accompanied by insider data leakage and abuse of privilege, are at an all-time high – reaffirming that most ERP data attacks are likely to result from the manipulation of legitimate login credentials.

In addition, data protection challenges are recognized by organizations worldwide. Legal and regulatory standards have become highly stringent, such as the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), etc., and require specific input into how corporations manage, use, and process PII. Under these regulations, organizations are expected to respond within a specified period of time to audit requests and report violations or face monetary penalties. Enterprises should also monitor and record granular data access information at all times, such as users in ERP applications accessing extremely sensitive data fields, where they access it at what frequency, and the like. By integrating additional regulatory criteria and the changing climate of threats, it is clear that identity and operation are the new common denominators for information security expertise.

Organizations should be prepared with deep insight into user behavior in view of the proliferation of access, the transition to user-centered risks, and strict regulatory criteria. User behavior monitoring and tracking within ERP applications may help organizations analyze the usage of ERP applications, strengthen the functionality of real-time auditing and monitoring, and provide actionable information to security teams for faster threat and incident response detection.

Let’s look into the challenges of legacy ERP logging.

Legacy ERP logging was not intended for monitoring user activities.

Legacy ERP logging features have been developed mainly for debugging and troubleshooting. Legacy ERP logs, created in an age before the proliferation of user-centered threats, lack the features required for today’s advanced security and enforcement requirements. For testing and development, system-focused, voluminous, and unstructured-out-of-the-box, ERP logging is all right but impractical for use in production environments. In their production environment, due to the output impact and the amount of “unactionable” data they produce, most organizations will turn off logging or restrict logging to the most basic functions such as tracking credential login and logout operations. As native logs are not intended to provide user experience information and any related contextual data, they restrict the ability of an organization to respond to user-centered threats. Although triggers may be introduced via custom development, these custom triggers see changes in data. However, they do not have any insight into data exposure (whether a data field has been accessed by a user). In addition, to these custom triggers, the maintenance cycles of software add additional work.

Inadequate capabilities for incident response.

Attacks have been increasingly targeted at obtaining login credentials of users in recent years. The key causes of breaches are brute force assaults, phishing, and other social engineering techniques, along with insider threats such as misuse of rights or accidental data leakage. Security teams often manually review network and database logs, and then assumption-based decisions are made. As a consequence, the detection of suspicious events becomes a time-consuming process in the event of a breach, delaying incident response, and remediation efforts.

Legacy ERP logs provide limited data for audit and compliance.

Strict guidelines on how organizations store, handle and use personal data have been established through data privacy regulations such as the SOX, GDPR, CCPA, and others. Since ERP systems with Personally Identifiable Information (PII) are abundant, they are a critical component of the compliance strategy of an organization. In terms of fines and remediation actions, failure to comply with data protection laws will cost organizations significantly. Most of these mandates are wide-ranging and have an effect on companies despite their geographical position (i.e., if, despite their location, US companies have EU citizens’ data, they must comply with the GDPR). Organizations must have good visibility into user behavior within their ERP applications in order to keep the compliance audit-ready. Who accesses what data, from where, when, and on what devices, for instance. These details are not supplied by the default logs from legacy ERP systems. Some data privacy regulations (e.g., GDPR) allow data subjects at any point in time to request an audit. Details about who accesses their info, what they do with it, and even online identifiers such as IP addresses will be searched for by these subjects. Businesses would be unable to respond to such audit requests in the absence of user-centered transaction records, placing them at risk of non-compliance. Organizations must also be prepared to address many questions simultaneously – a lengthy, unsustainable procedure with legacy system logs.

Ultimate data security and analytics technologies help organizations overcome all these challenges by equipping them with tools to easily and responsively control access and provide granular insight into user actions.

The Role Of Single Sign-On In Enhancing Cybersecurity

Single Sign-On (SSO) is a feature of Identity and Access Management (IAM) that allows users to securely authenticate only once for multiple applications and websites by signing in with only one set of credentials. Single Sign-On is compatible with any browser or device, making it simpler for users to use various apps or websites without entering different usernames and passwords, regardless of software, hardware, or domain. If users log out of any of the programs, all their sessions are terminated.

SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language) is a widely-used standard for the transfer of authorization credentials to service providers (SPs) through Identity Providers (IdPs). SAML transactions use Extensible Markup Language (XML) to provide IdPs and SPs with standardized communication. SAML is the connecting link between authentication of a user’s identity and authorization to use a service.

Single Sign-On gives users a seamless authentication experience while accessing the applications and third-party software.

The Three Components of Single Sign-On

1. User: The end-user who logs into the app by supplying credentials.

2. Identity Provider (IdP): This offers an identity to the customer – who is trying to access the app or website. The Identity Provider sends the Service Provider authentication data along with the customer’s access rights.

3. Service Provider (SP): It provides customers with the service. In order to allow access to the user, the app receives authentication information from the identity provider.

How Does Single Sign-On Function?

Single Sign-On makes a seamless experience possible by linking to a central server that all apps trust. When you first log in to the central server, a cookie will be generated. If you try to access a second application, you’ll be routed to the central server. If you already have a cookie on your central server, a key without login prompts will directly take you to the program, meaning that you have already signed in.

Single Sign-On: The Implementation

Some special advantages are provided by the implementation of Single Sign-On. In general, the SAML format is used by most Identity Providers (IdPs), including ADFS, Shibboleth, OKTA, Ping, and Azure. Custom coding to handle SAML assertions is included in the implementation of PeopleSoft Single Sign-On based on SAML, as PeopleSoft does not have native SAML support. It calls for professional competence. It also needs more hardware too. It also requires spinning up the internal network with an external web server and installing it. The software administration and development teams are overburdened with the increased workload after launch. Constant upkeep is involved in this system.

Single Sign-On: Key Advantages

SAML based SSO offers the following key advantages:

1. Centralized Identity and Access Management: A centralized management interface and a single user ID registry make it easy to assign and deactivate user identities easily.

2. Enhanced Security Posture: Authentication is delegated to SAML IdP; advanced authentication mechanisms ensure greater data security.

3. Single Identity: A safe, enterprise-wide network that can be centrally managed and secured with a standard password and security environment.

4. Reduced IT Expenses: Time spent on user identity management, group assignment, and password sharing is significantly reduced.

5. Improved User Interface and Tool Adoption Rate: Easy to use, SSO facilitates quicker adoption of the applications.

Conclusion

There are some turnkey solutions available that solve the problems of SAML implementation successfully. These solutions overcome these challenges in the implementation of PeopleSoft SAML SSO by providing a particular layer of SAML integration needed to link PeopleSoft, the Identity Provider, and Single Sign-On (SSO).

Tips To Ensure Cybersecurity In Remote Work Scenario

It is critical that security officials take measures to ensure cybersecurity in the current scenario. Malicious actors are launching attacks against organizations of all sizes and their employees who are operating remotely in the wake of COVID-19. Risk levels are spiking at frightening levels for businesses as the expanded perimeter is becoming more and more difficult to control.

Security teams should not be demotivated, out of fear, from protecting what they can manage. Data breaches happen over a relatively long period of time, with several measures taken to exfiltrate sensitive data. It is necessary to implement strict cyber hygiene measures across the organization in order to prevent potential attacks on their tracks.

Here are some practical guidelines for cyber hygiene enhancement and corporate data safety:

1. Prioritize patching critical assets

In most organizations, all properties should be handled with high priority when an immediate and/or high-gravity vulnerability has to be addressed. As new vulnerabilities emerge with the transition to work from home, it is important to fix business-critical vulnerabilities first.

2. Get granular visibility into your new, extended perimeter

A breach usually starts with one or a couple of compromised devices on the extended perimeter. Due to an employee’s weak password, phishing, or other unpatched flaws, this could happen. Your extended perimeter is more fragile than ever before with the rise of remote work.

3. Maintain a real-time inventory of all resources

It is very difficult to maintain an up-to-date business inventory system. As you cannot correct what you can’t measure, inaccurate inventory makes it difficult to manage compliance and cyber risk.

4. Make VPN available to all members

Companies with significant remote staff typically make available for their employees a robust VPN solution. But mobilizing to a VPN can be a nightmare at first for companies that are not used to staff working from home.

First of all, prioritize access to senior employees and privileged users because if their assets are compromised, it will have a much greater effect on the company. For visibility, make sure you have access to all VPN connections.

5. Implement Multi-Factor Authentication

Enterprises need to be able to distinguish between users who are trying to connect to a business resource or application in a comprehensive way. It is possible to create a functional, strong user identity using an Identity and Access Management (IAM) solution. Where possible, this will give you robust Multi-Factor Authentication and policy control and allow good password hygiene across managed and unmanaged apps.

6. Ensure endpoint security controls

Get ahead of the workforce, becoming victims of scams by implementing strict endpoint security policies for all workers. For each department or division, the endpoint protection that you deploy would focus on the business criticality of the assets of that team. If you have already introduced sufficient endpoint security, make sure the endpoint visibility is validated and stays consistent with remote users.

7. Audit users with admin privileges on business-critical applications

The more users you have on company applications with admin rights, the greater the risk of leveraging those assets. It could be the secret to a major breach when admin credentials on a sensitive asset are compromised. Define business-critical apps to address this, and audit the number of users with admin rights.

8. Develop sound system and application identity capabilities

Using client-side certificates, a strong system identity can be generated, and a strong application identity can be formed by using server-side certificates. It is important to renew expiring certificates and educate users who have the habit of clicking past certificate updates.

Managing SAP Segregation of Duties (SoD): Key Challenges

Organizations face a significant challenge when it comes to implementing the segregation of duties (SoD) in SAP. Many organizations detect possible SAP SoD breaches manually and execute laws in retrospect. This contributes to cumbersome procedures that take a great deal of time to complete and lots of work. In addition, auditors must review all users who have the potential to commit a violation in search of breaches and sift through a number of false-positives. Due to the rising amount and complexity of job activities, existing methods are becoming unscalable and expensive.

In managing SoD in SAP, the main challenges are as follows:

Static Policy Limitations

Access rights and permissions are natively assigned based on user responsibilities. Role-based access controls (RBACs) are rigid and unyielding; they present a user access-related ‘all or nothing’ scenario. Without contextual rules and risk-based restrictions, users can freely access and perform risky transactions in the applications.

Over-Provisioning

Role-based access controls (RBAC) allow organizations to build several positions for various job functions and tasks to delegate permissions. Over time, organizations risk a user gaining unnecessary, excessive privileges without regular manual monitoring of roles and prompt de-provision of privileges, potentially leading to SoD violations.

Inadequate Visibility

The data and transaction-level granularity needed to weed out false positives are missing in SAP GRC audit logs. They lack insight into the transaction’s context and require extra effort to analyze and resolve SoD violations.

Manual SoD Controls

Organizations depend on manual controls for preventive measures. If with current technological controls, the risk cannot be managed, any possible violations must be reviewed, examined, and handled by others. This approach is sluggish, diverts time from routine duties, and may lead to missed violations.

Compliance Management

One of the essential controls on financial transactions and primary operations within SAP applications is segregation of duties. A SoD violation on the part of organizations can mean non-compliance with guidelines for internal governance and external regulatory policies. Strict reporting deadlines are also enforced by many legislation, and typical periodic audits can potentially impede compliance management efforts.

Cumbersome Audits

Audit documentation must be carried out manually using current capabilities, which can be time-consuming as auditors check all user behavior in search of any real violations. Moreover, current logs lack insight into the context of data necessary for risk assessment and fraudulent activity. Failure to provide enough data and manual analysis can be vulnerable to mistakes, unscalable, and increasingly expensive.

How Can The Challenges Be Met?

To take on the above-described challenges head-on, SAP customers need to manage and drive their segregation of duties using a combination of defensive, attribute-based access controls and fine-grained analytics. Instead of retrospectively evaluating and mitigating enforcement breaches, unauthorized user behavior should be avoided in real-time, thus preventing potential infringements. Furthermore, providing fine-grained insight into real SoD violations streamlines the process of data collection and reporting and eliminates false positives substantially.

In order to block conflicting transactions at runtime, data protection solutions are available on the market that add an extra authorization layer to SAP GRC Access Control that compares user, data, and transaction attributes, along with defined SoD conflicts. Such security technologies also deliver visibility down to the field level in SAP transaction activities. With this fine-grained visibility, they correlate user, data, and transaction attributes along with specified SoD conflicts to detect and report actual SOD violations.

Conclusion

SoD is one of the principal facets of SAP ERP applications. Investing in ERP data security technologies that arm organizations with greater visibility and power, along with increased ease, goes a long way in order to retain a competitive edge for them. It also helps enterprises manage compliance better.

SAP Landscape Security: Some Common Myths

SAP connects and integrates all aspects of business operations while also storing high-value data related to different verticals of business such as finance, sales, and employee data, etc. The world’s most significant manufacturing, financial, and core infrastructure systems are managed through SAP systems.

Historically, SAP security has focused primarily on the management of authorization and the segregation of duties among business users. Of course, these controls are important for the overall level of security within the SAP landscape, but this picture of SAP landscape security is very small. As SAP continues to add new features, such as its HANA application platform, there are often security threats that are not properly treated. Moreover, customers frequently fail to identify security vulnerabilities and inadequate configurations in the technological components of the current SAP infrastructures.

It is obvious that it is desirable to properly defend the SAP landscape with an integral and systematic approach, given the high-profile threats and a wealth of documented SAP vulnerabilities. Nevertheless, SAP Landscape security still has many myths. The three most common among them are outlined here.

Myth 1: Securing Systems That Store Critical Data Is Adequate

Many organizations believe that if the systems which actually store the data are secure, the risk of unauthorized data alteration or sensitive information leakage is negligible. Cybersecurity firms are usually expected to assess only the adequacy and security of SAP systems and related databases that process and store financially relevant data. SAP is, therefore, or would be, at the heart of an enterprise’s business and its most critical processes. As such, access is required for many non-SAP IT applications, third parties, and personnel, offering many opportunities to misuse some of these logical access avenues. It is not about structures; it is about protecting the chain.

Myth 2: Frequently Patch And Implement Sap Security Baseline To Protect Against Attacks

In mid-2014, SAP finally released their security baseline template. The paper is insightful and discusses almost every aspect of SAP landscape protection. However, we have not seen a single entity that could implement the whole baseline and comply with their SAP infrastructure with the controls listed. The same holds true for the security upgrade process as well. Again, SAP has published a comprehensive guide to clarify how to install patches and individual security notices.

In addition, no organization can keep up with the pace of new security updates being issued, averaging around forty per month. Support packages should be installed regularly if you do not install every single note since they combine multiple important security patches. In order to install a service package or upgrade to a newer component release, it also requires extensive testing and days of downtime, which can have a huge impact on business continuity. SAP’s patch release process practically overwhelms the support teams, allowing critical security gaps to develop.

Myth 3: Security And Vulnerability Monitoring Is The Key

Some businesses have accepted that technology and application-level threats are becoming increasingly relevant and can provide attackers with unauthorized access to their most confidential data and business processes. Therefore, they consider it imperative to establish a comprehensive, enterprise-wide view of SAP protection, including security and threat monitoring of their SAP landscape. As we foster this development, we have seen many organizations struggle to implement a good monitoring strategy and subsequent threat management. Monitoring should be applied based on habits and scenarios: try not to detect the use of vulnerabilities in your SAP environment, but focus on attack vectors that revolve around impersonation. And even though you have powerful monitoring in place, it still acts as a signaling mechanism: only a few monitoring tools can avoid attacks. It is, therefore, the equilibrium between preventive, detective, and responsive measures that organizations should aim for.

Conclusion

The three above-described myths share a common factor: SAP security is a complex system that cannot be done right by focusing on individual aspects or enforcement. Though these individual aspects are an attractive way to limit the scope and gain a sense of control, all of them generate, on their own, only a false sense of protection. Considering the critical existence of the SAP landscape, these approaches are just not sufficient.

It is possible to protect the SAP landscape only by taking the perspective of an attacker. It is possible to develop a scenario-based approach in which a SAP landscape can be examined from the perpetrator’s point of view, and concerns can be answered as to whether the cyber incidents that organizations fear most can actually occur. That would ensure comprehensive SAP landscape security.