Access Control 5.3 End Of Life - Time To Upgrade, Or Do You Just Keep The Lights On?

Access Control 5.3 is due to exit “Mainstream Maintenance” and enter Extended Support at the end of 2015. Many organisations will find themselves in a situation of “end of life” with unsupported applications in various states. There is always the view that if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it. If you’re happy with only “keeping the lights on” without doing anything different, then there’s no immediate action.

However if you have plans to upgrade or patch your existing SAP systems, then you may encounter problems such as GRC systems no longer reporting access violations, or missing out on particular FireFighter functionality. So what should you do?

• Examine the current SAP roadmap & upgrade plans for the GRC landscape
• Explore the migration path
• Decide whether it is worth upgrading
• Look at the benefits:

1. Enhanced Risk Analysis, User Interfaces and reporting capabilities
2. More logging available in the FireFighter scenarios giving you much tighter controls
3. Inherent workflow capabilities within FireFighter, smoothing the audit of emergency access
4. A powerful and flexible workflow engine allowing more complex and realistic approval procedures for GRC master data and automated provisioning
5. More intuitive User Interface is providing much greater personal control
6. Improved Transport Management, enabling you to manage changes within GRC more efficiently and greater compliance than previous versions
7. Object level security providing proper robust security and authorisations capability

• Think about the wider picture
• Ensure that the project is not seen as a generic upgrade
• Keep up with technology

About Turnkey

Turnkey Consulting is helping to make the world a safer place to do business by specialising its expertise across Integrated Risk Management, Identity and Access Management, and Cyber and Application Security. We provide business consulting, technology implementation and managed services to help customers safeguard their application environments - protecting critical ERPs (such as SAP, Oracle and MS Dynamics) and wider enterprise systems.