Change and release management
The typical tasks of system support and administration of an SAP landscape include, among others:
Significant changes have also been brought about by SAP's cloud strategy. For example, the latest products such as SAP HANA and SAP S/4HANA are available entirely as cloud solutions.
Basis administrators often have basic ABAP knowledge, for example, and ABAP developers know the basics of SAP Basis. Nevertheless, the two fields of activity are usually organizationally separated in the company.
Support for adjustments and changes to the systems
A role concept according to best practice protects you from potential attacks within your SAP landscape. However, to protect your system from unauthorized access via the network, a correct configuration of the SAP gateway is required. It enables the use of external programs via interfaces or the call of ABAP programs and serves as a technical component of the application server, which manages the communication of all RFC-based functions.
In this article on SAP Security Automation I would like to take a look at the future of automated processes in the SAP Security area. For many companies, the topic of security automation still offers a lot of potential in terms of time savings and process optimisation. Our daily work environment offers numerous tasks that could be handled excellently automatically. For this reason, in this article I present two of the possibilities that already exist in the broad area of security automation. Security Automation via SAP Security Check The first option of Security Automation, which I want to introduce here, is the automatic verification of the existing permissions. Have you ever wondered who has critical permissions in your SAP system? And have you ever tried to do this by hand? Depending on the level of expertise and experience of the privilege administrator, this is a time-consuming work. If an audit is also announced and the SAP system is to be checked for critical permissions and segregation of duties, then it is very difficult to meet all requirements and secure the eligibility landscape in this respect. For this reason, various vendors provide solutions to automate the verification of the permission system with regard to critical permissions and segregation of duties using tool support. This allows permission administrators to use their valuable time to correct the errors rather than just looking for them. For example, we use a tool that runs through the verification of over 250 rules. We then get an evaluation of which rules are violated and which points are correct. A simple example of such rules is the use of the SAP_ALL profile. Another would be to grant the jump permission in debugging (S_DEVELOP permission object with the ACTVT = 02 field). These are two relatively simple examples of Security Check tools' rulebook. In addition, queries are also made, which are located in the field of Segregation of Duties. Using this tool allowed us to move from manual validation of critical permissions to an automatic process.
Some missing SAP basic functions in the standard are supplied by the PC application "Shortcut for SAP Systems".
After installing the GUI, the GUI patches should be applied as far as available.
These result from influences of digitalisation, digital transformation, new technologies such as cloud computing or big data, but also developments such as customer experience or the Internet of Things.