SAP vulnerability management can feel daunting — but it doesn’t have to be. It isn’t about fixing everything at once. Instead, it’s about gaining clarity, understanding where the real risks lie, and taking practical steps to address what matters most.
That reassurance matters, because SAP environments are often complex by design. They support business-critical processes, reflect years of configuration and legacy decisions, and increasingly span hybrid and cloud landscapes. It’s also common for vulnerability scans to generate long lists of findings, which can be difficult to work through with limited time and internal capacity.
Recent security incidents have highlighted why a focused approach to vulnerability management is so important. Several high-profile organizations running SAP, including Jaguar Land Rover, experienced major security incidents in 2025. In many cases, attackers exploited well-known issues such as misconfigurations, excessive privileges, and vulnerabilities that had already been identified but never prioritized.
The good news is that effective SAP vulnerability management is within reach. Rather than striving for perfection, focus on proactivity. You don’t have to react to every issue as it appears. Rather, you need to embed vulnerability management into day-to-day operations and prioritize the most important vulnerabilities first. In this blog, we explore seven best practices to help you move away from reactivity and toward confident, risk-based vulnerability management.
Seven best practices in SAP vulnerability management
Proactive vulnerability management gives you vital control over your SAP environment. Apply these seven best practices to move from reactive fixes to confident, risk-based management:
1: Start with governance, ownership, and change management
Clear ownership and accountability form the foundation of effective vulnerability management. With many vulnerabilities stemming from poorly controlled and managed system changes (e.g., configuration updates, system patches, emergency fixes, and user access changes), it’s critical to establish how changes are assessed, tested, approved, and logged and who owns each part of the process.
You should treat change management as a clearly defined security control. Applying Segregation of Duties (SoD) helps reduce risk further as does strong collaboration between business and technical stakeholders.
2: Embed early detection into the wider security strategy
Purpose-built vulnerability management tools like SecurityBridge or Onapsis can be used to reduce manual effort, enable continuous monitoring, and support triage in addition to detection. They can scan configurations, users' access, integrations, code and patching, with the findings aligned to SAP and industry baselines. This allows the tools to continue supporting your SAP environment as it evolves. However, it’s important to remember that tools on their own aren’t enough: expert interpretation of the findings is critical to decide on the right course of action, and to implement changes successfully.
3: Prioritize what matters most
When vulnerability tools generate large volumes of threats and vulnerabilities, it can be hard to know what to do next. Avoid panic and paralysis by understanding your business priorities and weighing vulnerabilities and related risks against them.
If this is too big a task for your internal team, enlist experts like Turnkey who understand both your systems and your business. Triage support will sift through all the findings in the vulnerability scan and help you prioritize according to severity, business impact, and likelihood of exploitation. This ensures that valuable team time is focused on the most important issues to resolve and doesn’t get wasted on low-risk issues that don’t generate meaningful business impact.
4: Use patch management to stay ahead of known vulnerabilities
Patching can address many known SAP vulnerabilities. Therefore, delaying patching can increase exposure, technical debt, and the burden of future remediation efforts. Although patching can be complex due to customization, testing requirements, and downtime concerns, it is an essential part of strengthening security maturity, reducing audit pressure, and smoothing out upgrades and cloud migrations. To maximize these benefits, patching should be proactive and risk-based, guided by vulnerability scans and expert triage, and planned, tested, and governed through formal change management.
5: Make user access management effective
Access control should be based on clearly defined job roles, ensuring permissions align with business functions rather than individuals. Organizations should adopt the principle of least privilege (PoLP), granting only the minimum access required for each role. Regular reviews should take place quarterly to ensure that joiners receive appropriate access, movers have permissions updated and overly inflated access are reviewed, and leavers are promptly deprovisioned.
6: Monitor behaviour and clear up continuously
Vulnerability management is a constant process of monitoring and housekeeping. You should keep close track of user activity, production system changes, and system and audit logs, all of which can help identify anomalous or risk behavior. Good housekeeping practice should include removing unused user profiles, locking inactive accounts, and disabling obsolete connections and programs.
7: Use vulnerability management to enable SAP cloud migration
Good vulnerability management can unlock new opportunities for business transformation, particularly easing the path to SAP cloud migration. That’s because removing vulnerabilities before migrating into S/4HANA or SAP cloud reduces risk and technical debt by identifying legacy issues, improving security awareness, and establishing better practice for the new environment. It also helps establish a security-first mindset that focuses on configuration, access control, and monitoring.
Leveraging expert support for SAP vulnerability management
As SAP landscapes grow in complexity, many organizations find that effective vulnerability management is less about individual actions and more about having the right support in place. This often starts with gaining a clear view of current security maturity, understanding which risks genuinely matter, and defining practical, sustainable ways to address them.
Support may also extend to implementing and configuring controls, selecting and integrating the most appropriate tools for the environment, and embedding vulnerability management into everyday operations so it becomes a consistent, business-as-usual activity rather than a reactive exercise.
Turnkey’s role is to provide independent, experience-led guidance across this journey — whether that’s assessing your existing approach, supporting tool selection and configuration across platforms such as SecurityBridge and Onapsis, or providing ongoing managed services. The aim is to help SAP teams focus on what matters most, and make meaningful, long-term reductions in business risk.
In summary: Take control of your SAP vulnerability management
Successful SAP vulnerability management is within reach. It’s important to remember that the goal shouldn’t be perfection: proactivity, prioritization, and consistency will give you the results you need. Make vulnerability management a continuous exercise, one that acknowledges that perfection in complex SAP landscapes is unrealistic, and you’ll find that meaningful risk reduction comes from steady, well-governed progress.
Having the right guidance in place can help you work towards those objectives with confidence, reduce business risk, minimize the disruption of audits and incidents, and build stronger foundations for future change. To learn more about how Turnkey can support you, get in touch with our team today.
Frequently asked questions about vulnerability management
1: Why do vulnerability scans show so many findings?
Vulnerability tools are designed to be thorough and naturally cautious, which makes many findings informational and relatively low-risk. High numbers of findings don’t always mean that your organization is insecure: this is where expert triage is so important in identifying what really matters.
2: What tools are used for SAP vulnerability management?
Tools such as SAP Enterprise Threat Detection, SecurityBridge, and Onapsis, among others, offer vulnerability scanning and monitoring to help identify issues. The right tools for you will depend on your system landscape, maturity, and goals. But remember that tools alone are not enough: expert interpretation is essential to prioritize findings and drive the right action.
3: How often should vulnerability management activities be carried out?
Continuously. Vulnerability management should never be considered a one-off exercise. Continuous monitoring, housekeeping, and reviews should be embedded into day-to-day operations, and scans and reviews should be performed regularly, at a frequency well-aligned to your system complexity and risk appetite.
4. What support does Turnkey provide for SAP vulnerability management?
Turnkey helps organizations gain clarity and control over SAP vulnerability management by assessing current maturity, identifying risks, and advising on practical remediation strategies. Support can include identifying the best vulnerability management technology for your SAP environment, implementing and configuring security controls and tools, as well as interpreting vulnerability findings. Ongoing managed services and security support can then help embed vulnerability management into regular operations and reduce long-term business risk.
