What makes a racing car so fast? And what does that have to do with security?
The engine, gearbox, and aerodynamics are all important to generate power and maintain speed. But ultimately, to beat the competition, the driver needs the confidence to accelerate for as long as possible. And to do that, they need strong, reliable brakes. Braking systems aren’t about restricting the capability of a car—they’re about unlocking all the potential in the rest of the machine.
The same applies to security’s role in business transformation. When organizations try to drive forward with transformation initiatives, a lack of security controls can mean they have to stop (retire the car) when things get risky.
In the context of migration to SAP in the cloud, understanding your requirements as outlined by SAP’s Shared Responsibility Model from the outset is your opportunity to put that top-grade braking system in place and shift the role of security beyond protection towards performance. This doesn’t have to mean a more complex or constrained cloud migration journey. It does mean that you can implement a security architecture that makes everything else possible, faster, with more confidence.
In this blog, we’ll outline what your new security landscape will look like with SAP in the cloud and how you can use it to drive wider business initiatives.
The business transformation opportunity and what SAP Business Suite really enables
A transition roadmap to SAP Cloud ERP public or private won’t look like your typical enterprise software migration journey. Supporting continuous digital evolution and unifying managed services, infrastructure, and software, it creates new opportunities for agility and business transformation.
The mindset around your migration should be focused on enabling new capabilities. This includes the role of security. Planning security properly, right from the start of the migration, builds a strong foundation for new functions that can differentiate your organization from your competitors. For example, with proper security architecture in place, you’ll be able to approach big business decisions like mergers, acquisitions, or service line integrations with confidence rather than fear.
Alongside this, early compliance planning can also break down the regulatory barriers to market entry and business expansion. Building compliance-ready architectures from the outset can drive security maturity, create business justification for important investment, and put key decision-makers in a position to say “yes” to new opportunities as soon as they arise.
In practice, taking advantage of this transformation opportunity means considering licensing implications, infrastructure sizing, and user experience design from the outset, as well as maintaining data confidentiality, integrity, and availability during the migration. This approach prevents costly delays caused by retroactively addressing security issues mid-migration and can help attract board-level attention and achieve buy-in from key decision-makers.
Understanding your new SAP security landscape
There’s a general lack of understanding about the Shared Responsibility Model for SAP in the cloud. In fact, many organizations don’t realize that they have any security responsibility at all. But, once you grasp its fundamentals, the Shared Responsibility Model provides vital clarity about how security investments can be focused for maximum business impact.
The Shared Responsibility Model
Learn more about the Shared Responsibility Model in this datasheet by Turnkey and Onapsis.
In short, SAP looks after the complex, commoditized infrastructure challenges, while you focus on the areas that directly drive business value:
- SAP responsibilities: Infrastructure layer, data centers, network security, operating system and database security, core technical patching.
- Customer responsibilities: Application layer security, data-layer protections, access governance and user permission design, custom code security, transport security and change management, compliance adherence and monitoring, threat detection and response.
This demarcation means you can focus security investment on areas of business differentiation and make informed decisions about that investment. And as a result, your organization will be better placed to:
- Respond to threats and opportunities faster than before.
- Take bold business decisions and run with them, thanks to proper monitoring.
- Use embedded security as an enabler of innovation.
- Reduce manual overheads and boost efficiency through security automation.
Practical steps for SAP cloud security success
SAP cloud security has to be proactive and built to meet the hyper-fast pace of security and business, with continuous monitoring, automated controls, and holistic risk views enabling business intelligence. Modern security systems must also engage all kinds of stakeholders and users involved in an SAP environment.
This approach is essential for aligning security operations to the speed of business innovation, and is the only viable approach to managing modern security at scale. However, achieving this requires expertise above and beyond what most organizations have in-house and a strategic view to building an adaptable security architecture.
From our experience, any SAP cloud security strategy should include:
- Early engagement: Convincing key decision-makers like the C-suite, the board, and audit committee of the benefits of implementing security early.
- Stakeholder involvement: Bringing together key stakeholders, including IT teams, security professionals, system integrators, and others across the business to ensure SAP cybersecurity doesn’t slip back into being a siloed IT function.
- Clear responsibilities: Understanding exactly who oversees what in the shared responsibility model and how that will be managed throughout the business.
- Business alignment and integration: Keeping the architecture aligned with your business’s growth agenda and using security monitoring as business intelligence to provide insights into operational efficiency and system health.
- Treating security as a functional requirement: Working with external SAP experts to ensure that security is embedded in your migration process right from the outset.
In summary: Securing a strategic partner for a successful transformation
Just like a good racing car works best when all its systems work together in integrated harmony, the same principle applies to your SAP cloud migration. No business transformation or acceleration strategy is complete without expert guidance on the security architecture that makes everything possible.
This doesn’t have to make it more complicated: the Shared Responsibility Model, properly understood and implemented, can be your competitive advantage rather than an additional burden. But to enable your organization to move faster, more confidently, and with greater agility than ever before, it does require an expert understanding of both SAP technical architecture and business change dynamics. That’s where specialists like Turnkey Consulting come in.
We’re uniquely placed to bridge the gap between business strategy and technical security implementation. We can help you understand precisely what you’re responsible for under SAP’s Shared Responsibility Model in a language all your stakeholders can understand. We can also guide you away from the common pitfalls and put in place security frameworks that continually improve business agility.
Our expertise covers all the bases: a business-first approach that covers the transformation experience, governance frameworks, identity and access management, and vulnerability management. Combined with strong partnerships with leading cybersecurity platforms, we can build Digital Enterprise Resilience into your organization and reposition your security investment as a strategic business enabler.
Get more detailed insights on how the Shared Responsibility Model works for RISE with SAP by watching this on-demand webinar. Or get in touch with one of our experts today to discuss your specific needs.
