Most organizations today have an IT environment that combines on-premises and cloud services. This hybrid deployment model has many advantages including flexibility, scalability, and cost control. However, these advantages also come with increased complexity and several security challenges that must be addressed to safeguard data integrity, confidentiality, and availability (also known as the “CIA triad”). Protecting SAP environments is a top priority because of the mission-critical business processes and the sensitive data it houses. Organizations can implement several security strategies to defend against attacks and safeguard their valuable data.
Data Security and Privacy
One of the first issues to address is data security and privacy. This is particularly complex in hybrid settings. An increasing amount of sensitive data is housed in SAP environments and processed by on-premises systems and multiple cloud environments. Each area has unique security protocols and, unfortunately, potential vulnerabilities. Organizations can best protect systems and data by implementing consistent data protection measures across all platforms.
Another key strategy is to protect sensitive data using robust encryption for data at rest and in transit. The main point is that if the data gets intercepted, it will be unreadable due to its encryption. This must be applied to all related services and components. For instance, SAP HANA, a data storage service, offers various encryption options. Many SAP components can also secure communication using Transport Layer Security (TLS) or Secure Network Communication (SNC).
Another essential way for organizations to maintain data security and privacy is to pay attention to access controls. Proper access controls are integral to maintaining data security and privacy, especially in more complex, hybrid environments. This means using strong authentication and authorization mechanisms to control—monitor, permit, and restrict—access to sensitive data. To this end, multi-factor authentication (MFA) and role-based access control (RBAC) are good ways to ensure effective access policies. As a final strategy, organizations must prioritize regular audits. This involves holding routine security audits and compliance checks to locate and address any possible vulnerabilities in the data handling process.
Identity and Access Management (IAM)
Another challenge is managing identities and access controls across a hybrid SAP environment. Users want seamless access to resources, whether on-premises or in the cloud, but this must be offered without jeopardizing security.
First, user management and authentication should be centralized where possible to create a controlled identity and access management (IAM) position. Examples of these are SAP Cloud Identity Services and other industry-standard solutions.
After unifying and centralizing the authentication, single sign-on (SSO) must be ensured. This solution gives users the seamless experience they desire by simply using one set of credentials. This policy improves their user experience and does not compromise security.
Following up on unification and SSO, organizations should create conditional access policies that assess risk factors such as user location, device compliance, and behavior before granting access. This way, no user gains access without secure conditions. As always, the capstone is the review. Organizations must have a routine review of user permissions that verifies access rights are up-to-date and applicable to current job responsibilities.
[The Sap] hybrid deployment model has many advantages including flexibility, scalability, and cost control. However, these advantages also come with increased complexity and several security challenges that must be addressed to safeguard data integrity, confidentiality, and availability (also known as the “CIA triad”).Network Security
A third security issue to address in hybrid IT environments is ensuring secure communication and protection against network-based threats. Due to the hybrid landscape's increased complexity, this is a serious challenge. Organizations should implement protocols such as TLS or deploy VPN connections for data transmission between on-premises SAP systems and cloud-based services to ensure secure communication. Ensuring all endpoints are correctly configured to support these protocols is also crucial.
A needed follow-up is to map on-premises tiers with their cloud counterparts. Connections between systems or services should only be created if there is a business requirement. Today's landscapes are highly integrated, and data is exchanged within the landscape as well as with multiple other partners, such as business partners and governmental organizations. In a hybrid landscape, this complexity increases because of the distribution of services and responsibilities. Also, consider the differences in deployments in a landscape. For example, it is not uncommon to see on-premise SAP systems in a setup with multiple non-production systems, such as development, test, quality, etc. Cloud services typically offer fewer tiers, often providing just a production environment and a sandbox environment. How is this all connected? Careful mapping of on-premise and cloud services is essential to make sure all connections are in scope and properly secured.
Organizations must ensure their network architecture is well-aligned. On-premises environments often depend heavily on the security of network perimeters, operating under the assumption that risk primarily originates from the ‘outside’ and that the ‘inside’ is safe and can be implicitly trusted. In contrast, cloud-based services typically do not rely on this assumption to the same extent, if at all. These different approaches are contradictory and mixing these architectures in today’s highly integrated, hybrid landscapes easily creates confusion and security risk.
Organizations should treat components similarly and consistently, regardless of location. For example: in on-premise environments, it is not uncommon to see the use of insecure connections such as plain HTTP or FTP. Additionally, encrypted file storing and sharing are often permitted for what are regarded as “internal” connections.
Compliance and Regulatory Challenges
Another issue to face to secure the hybrid environment is navigating compliance requirements and regulatory standards across the hybrid SAP landscape. This can be a challenge because there are different regional and industry-specific regulations. Maintaining compliance across all components is necessary to avoid legal and financial ramifications.
To best comply, organizations should utilize compliance management tools. There are great tools out there that will automate compliance checks and generate reports, streamlining processes and providing more accuracy. With the proper tools in place, organizational leaders should follow up with policy enforcement. This means creating and enforcing security policies that align with regulatory requirements. It is critical to ensure that the policies are consistently applied across both on-premises and cloud environments. Make sure that policies are supported by leadership, concrete, comprehensive, and easily accessible for employees
Compliance also means that organizations should review data residency requirements. These requirements provide instructions as to where data can be stored and processed. To comply with local regulations, use cloud providers that offer data residency options.
Organizations should regularly hold employee training sessions regarding compliance requirements and best practices. Every employee must be sure of their roles and responsibilities in maintaining compliance.
Incident Response and Disaster Recovery
Security challenges must all be met with a good plan of action in case of an attack or system failure. Organizations must know precisely what to do; there can be no guessing, which means organizational leaders and IT must respond swiftly and effectively. Due to its distributed nature, a hybrid IT environment makes incident response and disaster recovery efforts challenging.
The first step to a swift response is an incident response plan. The plan must have procedures for both on-premises and cloud-based SAP systems and be routinely tested and updated. Moreover, a robust disaster recovery plan is equally important. Make sure these plans are up to date and include protocols for on-premises and cloud-based components. Plans must be routinely tested to ensure effectiveness.
With response and recovery plans in place, organizations should implement unified monitoring and logging solutions. These tools will give visibility into both on-premises and cloud environments. Centralized dashboards are key for detecting and responding to incidents quickly. Establish clear communication channels with cloud service providers so that response efforts may be coordinated during incidents. Last, follow a shared responsibility model and understand the responsibilities assigned to each party involved in the response.
Conclusion
The hybrid IT environment can be a challenge regarding security issues. However, encryption, access control, centralized management, secure communication protocols between the on-premises and cloud-based systems, endpoint verification, mapping, compliance tools, and incident and response plans are some of the mitigating strategies the hybrid SAP environment necessitates. Overarching them all is the need for monitoring, auditing, and training.
SAP environments are vulnerable to business-critical processes and sensitive data. Thus, organizational oversight of the whole landscape and consistent measures across the board are required. When organizations understand the various approaches to securing their data, they can fully realize the many benefits of a hybrid SAP landscape.
Gert-Jan Koster
Is a SAP security specialist at SecurityBridge. He brings over 20 years of SAP experience and holds certifications on SAP Architecture and Integration, and over ten additional SAP-related certifications. Before SecurityBridge, Koster spent over 20 years working as an SAP integration and technology consultant for companies such as Deloitte Nederland, Universiteit Leiden, Atos Origin, and others. Most notably, he was involved in architecture and product design at Protect4S, a Dutch SAP security services provider SecurityBridge acquired in September 2023. Koster holds a degree from Open Universiteit (Heerlen, Netherlands) in Information Technology.