Implementing SAP’s Segregation of Duties (SoD) is sometimes a time-consuming task for businesses. Many firms discover possible SAP SoD infractions manually and enforce policies after the fact. As a result, time-consuming processes and a considerable number of working hours are required to finish them. Furthermore, auditors must examine all users with the potential to conduct a violation in order to find violations and sift through a large number of false-positives. Due to the rising number and complexity of work duties, current techniques are becoming unscalable and expensive.
The following are the main issues in addressing SoD in SAP:
Inadequate Visibility
The data and transaction-level granularity necessary to filter out false positives is lacking from SAP GRC audit logs. They lack understanding of the transaction’s context, necessitating extra work to analyze and remedy SoD violations.
Static Policy Limitations
Access rights and permissions are granted naturally based on user roles. When it comes to granting access to users, role-based access controls (RBACs) are inflexible and uncompromising; they provide a scenario where it’s all or nothing. Without contextual rules or risk-based limitations, users can easily access and perform dangerous transactions in the apps.
Over-provisioning
Organizations can use role-based access controls (RBAC) to define several roles and allocate permissions for different job responsibilities and activities. Organizations risk a customer obtaining undesired, unreasonable powers over time without frequent manual oversight of roles and timely de-provisioning of privileges, potentially leading to SoD violations.
Manual SoD Controls
Organizations rely on manual controls to mitigate risk. Any possible breaches must be evaluated, checked, and addressed by others if risk cannot be reduced with present technical measures. This method is slow, takes time away from ordinary tasks, and can lead to infractions being unnoticed.
Complicated Audits
Audit reporting must be done manually using current capabilities, which can be time consuming because auditors must review all user behavior in order to find any genuine violations. Furthermore, present logs lack context for data essential for risk assessment and fraudulent activity. Failure to supply appropriate data and manual analysis can be prone to mistakes, unscalable, and more expensive.
Compliance
Within SAP systems, SoD is one of the most important controls on financial transactions and key activities. A SoD violation might imply non-compliance with internal governance principles and external regulatory policies on the part of enterprises. Many rules have severe reporting deadlines, and typical periodic audits might possibly stymie enforcement efforts.
Addressing the Challenges
To meet the aforementioned issues, SAP clients must track and drive their division of tasks using a combination of defensive, attribute-based controls and fine-grained analytics. Instead of analyzing and remediating enforcement infractions after the fact, they could prohibit incorrect user behaviour in real time, so preventing an infringement. Furthermore, having fine-grained insights into true SoD violations simplifies the data gathering and reporting process while reducing the number of false positives.
On the market, data security solutions that add an extra authorization layer to SAP GRC Access Control that connects user, data, and transaction parameters, as well as defined SoD conflicts, to prevent conflicting transactions at runtime are available. Such security solutions frequently enable visibility down to the field level in SAP transaction processes. They may correlate user, data, and transaction properties, as well as declared SoD conflicts, to discover and report real SOD violations, thanks to this fine-grained visibility.
