Risk: historically grown authorizations
Permissions with status
It's never too late to rethink your authorization concept. Start by defining the objective of each role and take advantage of the reporting offered in SAP SuccessFactors.
To do this, in the SU24 transaction, open the application you want to customise. To maintain the missing suggestion values, you can start the trace here by clicking on the button Trace. You can of course also use the system trace for permissions via the ST01 or STAUTHRACE transactions. A new window will open. Click here on the Evaluate Trace button and select System Trace (ST01) > Local. In the window that opens you now have the opportunity to restrict the trace to a specific user or to start it directly. To do this, enter a user who will call the application you want to record, and then click Turn on Trace. Now, in a separate mode, you can call and run the application you want to customise. Once you have completed the activities that you need permission checks, i.e. you have finished the trace, you will return to your application in the transaction SU24 and stop the trace by switching off the button trace. To perform the evaluation, click the Evaluate button. To obtain the trace data for each authorization object, select the authorization object you want to customise in the upper-left pane of the Permissions object drop-down list.
Add New Organisation Levels
In addition to SAP book recommendations on SAP authorizations, I can also recommend the books from Espresso Tutorials such as "SAP Authorizations for Users and Beginners" by Andreas Prieß * or also the video tutorial "SAP Authorizations Basics - Techniques and Best Practices for More Security in SAP" by Tobias Harmes. Both are, among other media, also included in the Espresso Tutorials Flatrate, which I have also presented in more detail under SAP Know How.
In order to be able to act fully at all times in emergency situations, an SAP emergency user must be available who has all authorizations for the entire SAP system (typically by means of the composite profile SAP_ALL). However, this not only makes him a great help, but also extremely dangerous, so that his use must be precisely regulated via a dedicated concept.
However, if your Identity Management system is currently not available or the approval path is interrupted, you can still assign urgently needed authorizations with "Shortcut for SAP systems".
For example, you can log failed RFC calls system-wide, delete users, or log all activities of the default user, DDIC.
The security of an SAP system in operation depends on many factors.