Problem Statement
It’s a well-known fact that in the current economic, geopolitical, and digital transformation context, cyber security is being marked by every enterprise as a top priority. Nevertheless, it’s an increasingly complex and expensive activity due to the ever-evolving threat landscape and the critical importance of protecting sensitive data and systems.
First, the cyber threat landscape is continuously evolving, with cybercriminals using sophisticated techniques to breach defenses. Enterprises must continuously adapt their security measures to stay ahead of these threats, which requires ongoing research, training, and investment in cutting-edge technologies.
Second, compliance with industry regulations and data protection laws further increases the complexity of security operations. Enterprises must adhere to specific standards and demonstrate compliance, which often involves audits and additional security measures.
Investing in quality security solutions, employing skilled cybersecurity professionals, and conducting regular security assessments and audits all contribute to the cost of security. Furthermore, recovering from security breaches can be expensive, involving investigations, data recovery, legal fees, and potential damage to a company's reputation.
To help confront these threats, SAP continues to build on our heritage of excellence, with thousands of organisations around the world trusting SAP to deliver secure cloud operations that help protect their SAP applications and data.
This blog aims to assist our customers in understanding the benefits of utilising SAP cloud services to improve their security posture on multiple fronts.
- Robust Physical Security of Cloud Data Centers
Firstly, SAP cloud customers can benefit from industry leading physical security measures that safeguard cloud data centers: SAP only operates from tier III or IV data centers, ensuring complete component redundancy, over 99.9% physical uptime, and comprehensive resources dedicated to thwarting physical data theft. These measures include the presence of security guards, secure cages for servers, and advanced physical security controls.
Moreover, the segregation of customer networks from the cloud provider infrastructure significantly mitigates various threats arising from employee workstations. This segregation ensures that only authorised logical connections are possible, reducing risks such as malware propagation from employee workstations or malicious actions carried out by disgruntled employees with physical access.
- Resilient Cloud Infrastructure: High Availability & Disaster Recovery
Cloud migration enables organisations to enhance their disaster recovery capabilities significantly. SAP as a cloud provider offers geo-redundant data centers and automatic backup services, ensuring data availability and minimising downtime in the event of a disaster. By leveraging cloud-based disaster recovery solutions, our clients can quickly recover critical systems and data, reducing the impact of potential disruptions caused by natural disasters, hardware failures, or cyberattacks.
- SAP Cloud Security: Orchestration & Automation are Key.
When creating a cloud account with any major cloud provider, it is essential to recognise that default configurations are typically optimised for ease-of-onboarding rather than security. It becomes the responsibility of the public cloud infrastructure consumer to properly fortify all cloud components to establish a secure-by-design cloud infrastructure. This task is not trivial and demands a high level of expertise to ensure secure construction and operation.
This is an area where SAP excels in delivering value. Through the standardisation of offerings, we can achieve a significant level of automation by instantly deploying hardened OS images, network components, and secure-by-default solutions. Leveraging the capability of cloud environments to instantiate infrastructure as code, SAP develops secure templates based on industry best practices such as CIS security benchmarks. These templates enable the automated deployment of secure-by-design architectures.
Once the infrastructure is operational, continuous scanning is performed to assess its compliance with security standards. The results are closely monitored by management through KPI reporting, ensuring swift remediation of any identified gaps and maintaining the desired level of compliance. SAP works with industry leading cloud security solutions as well as developing our own, unique solutions.
It is important to note that this approach is identical for both SAP’s SaaS solutions and its private cloud solutions.
- Cyber Fusion Center: SAP's Comprehensive Security Operations
As part of our commitment to security, SAP has taken a holistic approach to strengthening its security position. SAP’s Cyber Fusion Center (CFC) embodies a multidisciplinary approach that seamlessly integrates cyberthreat intelligence with advanced security tools and technology operations. This encompasses the utilisation of AI-powered threat detection algorithms, 24/7 real-time monitoring, and automated incident response mechanisms.
By bringing together independent security functions into a cohesive operational environment, CFC promotes the integration and synergy required to detect and combat sophisticated threats.
When organisations transition to the cloud with SAP, they gain access to these innovative security capabilities, bolstering their own security operations.
- Highly Skilled Cyber Security Workforce
As the demand for skilled cyber professionals surpasses supply, managing complex on-premise security becomes challenging. Leveraging economies of scale and prioritizing security as a paramount concern, SAP has allocated substantial resources towards attracting and nurturing leading security professionals. This strategic approach allows us to maintain a robust information security management system, to translate security policies and regulation requirements into pragmatic and quantifiable controls and to offer our developers comprehensive training to instill a security-centric mindset from project inception. All these activities eventually result in us being able to build and operate secure-by-design cloud services in which our customers can place their trust.
- Supporting Regulatory Compliance for our Customers
In order to truly establish and nurture trust with our customers, to consistently deliver a highly secure and resilient service, it is crucial to maintain maximum transparency regarding the implemented security processes and controls.
To achieve this goal, SAP assigns significant resources to conduct annual audits performed by reputable third-party auditors. These audits independently demonstrate the effectiveness of our security controls and compliance with industry standards. Our certifications and attestation reports, including SOC 2 Type II, C5, ISO 27001, ISO 27017, ISO 27018, and ISO 22301, further attest to our commitment to regulatory compliance.
By transitioning to the cloud, organisations can leverage these compliance measures, thereby entrusting a substantial portion of the responsibility for maintaining regulatory compliance to the cloud provider. This alleviates organisations from the burden of constant monitoring and updating of their own infrastructure to meet ever-evolving compliance requirements.
Conclusion
In conclusion, elevating your enterprise security posture by migrating to SAP Cloud offers numerous benefits that address the complex challenges of today's threat landscape.
With a holistic strategy encompassing robust physical data center security, resilient cloud infrastructure, a skilled cybersecurity workforce, orchestrated cloud security, a proactive Cyber Fusion Center, and a commitment to regulatory compliance, SAP enables businesses to navigate the complex cybersecurity domain. Migrating to SAP’s secure cloud operations empowers organisations to strengthen their security while reducing the burden of maintaining compliance, earning the trust of their global customer base.
For more details on how SAP implements & operates security, please visit SAP’s Trust Center or reach out to your SAP account executive to schedule a more in-depth discussion with our Cyber Security Advisory team.
