Managing risk and becoming resilient against prevalent cyber dangers is an increasingly complex task. We live in a mega-connected world, and organizations are assessing and improving their governance maturity step by step to ensure a more secure digital environment for everyone.
Applying the CMM approach to SAP application security involves strategically integrating governance maturity best practices into every aspect of your SAP system’s management. The governance and compliance life cycle involves the ongoing management and safeguarding against internal and external threats toward your information systems and data. This cycle includes three stages: getting clean, staying clean, and optimizing. The goal of this cycle is to establish and maintain effective access control measures.
Utilizing CMM enhances your security measures through more efficient organization for assessing and improving your risk mitigation efforts. Keep reading for a primer on each stage in the governance and compliance life cycle.
Getting Clean
In the first stage of the governance and compliance life cycle, the goal is to produce a more risk-free environment by creating more visibility into your risk landscape. You do that in two stages:- Identify the scope of your application landscape. What does that mean? You take inventory. This assessment starts with creating a record of all applications within your organization. Identify and document all applications you’re currently using, along with the users with access to each system. Identifying technical debt and user access bloat can help streamline focus to critical applications with key user bases.
- Execute access risk analysis (ARA) to identify and correct risks in any existing access. Look at your existing access rights and permissions for each application. Determine who has access to what and assess if these permissions are appropriate.
Keeping sensitive data safe is more important than ever. Conducting this risk analysis ensures that only the right people can access the appropriate data. When you take the time to conduct a thorough ARA, you’ll see many benefits:
- Enhanced security and authorized access
- Effective regulatory compliance
- Optimized resource utilization
- Improved data integrity
- Strengthened reputational standing
- Reduced operational costs
Staying Clean
After you’ve done the detective work in the getting clean stage, you stay clean by using an automated process. Here, you start implementing preventative risk checks to ensure that you address the potential security threats when people come, go, and move within your business.Streamlining with access request management
Streamlining your access request management efforts centralizes access requests, approvals, and auditing — all within a user-friendly interface. After getting the appropriate approvals, you ensure that the right people have access to the right data. Those approvals can include manager review, role or access owner review, and risk owner approval with any necessary mitigating controls applied prior to provisioning access.Validating user access certifications
User access certifications ensure that users’ outdated access rights don’t remain. They also maintain the regular review and revalidation of controls and risks so you stay up to date.Strike the right balance between efficiency and effectiveness in application access certifications. Automating, centralizing, and optimizing the certification process reduces the amount of time it takes to complete user access reviews and enhances their accuracy and impact.
Optimizing
In the last stage, optimizing, you focus on continually improving your environment after establishing a documented, repeatable, and automated risk management process (that’s in the first two stages: getting clean and staying clean).Automating elevated access management processes
The automation of elevated access management processes enables you to optimize how sensitive access is requested, provisioned, and monitored. This approach builds on the access risk analysis results to identify sensitive access and enable end-users to request temporary, time-bound checkout of the access. After approvals are received, access is automatically provisioned and deprovisioned in alignment with the approved timeframe, with change logs available for management review.Ensuring that elevated access processes are efficient and consistent helps your company implement improved risk management, gain auditor approval, and improve end-user satisfaction.
Monitoring and quantifying risk exposure
You can’t eliminate every risk, and you may go crazy trying. Set predefined thresholds for your risk exposure so you can identify the risks that threaten those limits. That way, you’re only tracking and reporting on all quantifiable risks that actually occurred instead of the thousands of risks that never happened, which wastes everyone’s precious time. Executing continuous controls monitoring and risk quantification produces efficient and consistent processes to help save time, increase productivity, lower costs, and implement approved designs.Addressing threat detection
Focus on what matters. Security and operations teams often lack visibility and understanding of the data that can indicate potential architecture-level security threats — threats that may harm your critical business applications. But with a continuous monitoring system, you can reap the benefits of threat detection and response capabilities, such as- Continuous threat detection coverage for thousands of threat indicators
- Automatic updates with the latest threat information, patch availability, and ongoing research
- Rapid response to threats with resolution guidance so you can reduce investigation response times
- Enriching your security information and event management (SIEM) applications with detailed threat detection data
How Pathlock Can Help
When dealing with risk, Pathlock provides customers with a comprehensive set of modular capabilities. Designed to seamlessly work together, the available tools reduce potential risk by following the get clean, stay clean, optimize methodology. To learn more about this practice, visit www.pathlock.com/sap.To find out more about Pathlock and SAP application security, check out SAP Application Security For Dummies, Pathlock Special Edition. Head to get.pathlock.com/direct-ebook-sap-application-security-for-dummies-special-edition for your free e-book and start planning your SAP application security strategy to get clean, stay clean, and optimize.