Moving Beyond SAP IdM: Building an Enterprise IGA Strategy for SAP and Beyond

Identity and access have evolved differently across SAP and the wider application estate. SAP access may be managed separately from Active Directory, Microsoft applications, CRM platforms, and other business systems, with different processes for provisioning, approvals, and access reviews.

Enterprise Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) gives you an opportunity to bring those processes under a more consistent model. It can provide a coordinated way to manage the employee lifecycle, enforce controls, and understand access risk across SAP and non-SAP environments.

The reasons for integrating SAP and enterprise IGA vary by organization. Often these include moving to S/4HANA, looking to simplify joiner, mover, and leaver processes, integrating applications after growth or acquisition, or adapting to a more complex identity landscape that includes cloud services, third parties, and non-human identities. For some, the sunsetting of SAP Identity Management (IdM) is an urgent trigger.

Whatever prompts the change, enterprise IGA requires more than introducing a new technology platform. You need to understand the quality of your identity data, how roles are structured, how access is requested and approved, and how your existing provisioning processes work across the application estate.

The practical challenge is therefore understanding your current environment well enough to design an enterprise identity model that works across SAP and the wider application estate. This blog explores the scenarios that commonly prompt organizations to introduce enterprise IGA, the foundations they need to put in place, and the practical considerations for selecting and implementing a platform that governs SAP effectively.

Why introduce enterprise IGA that covers SAP? 

When identity governance is applied across the enterprise, a new employee can receive appropriate access to SAP alongside Active Directory, Microsoft applications, CRM platforms, and other business applications as part of a coordinated joiner process. As their responsibilities change, their access can change with them.

This avoids a common problem where a new starter is given the same access as the person who previously held the role. If that employee had accumulated permissions over many years, the new starter can inherit far more access than they need.

An enterprise-wide view also makes risks easier to see across application boundaries. Someone might be able to create vendors in one application and make payments in another, creating a segregation-of-duties (SoD) conflict that remains invisible when the systems are governed separately.

The same view makes it easier to understand what access must change when someone moves roles or leaves. It also supports more consistent access requests, approvals, and reviews, rather than relying on separate processes for each part of the application estate.

For SAP teams, the value is not simply bringing SAP into a broader platform. It is ensuring that SAP access, roles, and risks are included in the enterprise identity model while retaining the depth of governance that complex SAP environments require.

Different scenarios can lead to the same strategic need

The case for enterprise IGA does not always begin with the same business problem. Different changes and pressures can expose gaps in identity governance but often lead to the same need for a more consistent model across SAP and non-SAP applications.

Fragmented access governance: SAP and non-SAP applications are governed through separate tools and processes, making it difficult to apply consistent lifecycle controls or see risk across application boundaries.

Business and technology transformation: An S/4HANA program, HR transformation, cloud initiative, shared-services program, or acquisition is changing roles, data, applications, or organizational structures. The identity model needs to evolve with them.

Lifecycle-management challenges: Onboarding takes too long, movers retain inappropriate access, or leaver processes depend on manual intervention. Enterprise IGA can provide a more coordinated model across the application estate.

Audit and compliance requirements: The organization needs clearer evidence of who has access, how it was approved, how often it is reviewed, and where conflicting access exists across systems.

AI and non-human identity growth: The identity landscape now includes employees, contractors, third parties, service accounts, bots, AI agents, and other non-human identities. As more identities interact with SAP and the wider application estate, organizations need consistent ownership and governance that extends beyond the human employee lifecycle.

A move away from SAP IdM: SAP IdM mainstream maintenance ends in 2027, with extended maintenance available until 2030, and SAP has no like-for-like successor product planned. Organizations using it therefore need to understand what the current environment does before deciding how those requirements should be supported through enterprise IGA and complementary SAP identity and access capabilities.

Although the starting points differ, the next step is the same: understand how identity and access operate today before deciding what the future platform and governance model need to support.

Start with discovery, not technology

 Once you have identified the need for enterprise IGA, the next step is to define what it must support. That starts with discovery and continues through requirements-led platform and integration design, phased implementation, and a clear operating model for what happens after go-live.

Discovery needs to establish how identities and access are actually managed, rather than simply producing a list of high-level capabilities. Over time, important provisioning logic, configurations, integrations, and business rules can become embedded in individual systems and processes. As a result, existing documentation may no longer reflect how the environment operates in practice. 

Discovery should help you understand how positions map to roles, what provisioning logic has been customized, and whether existing processes perform technical activities outside conventional role provisioning. The goal is to identify dependencies so you can decide what should be preserved, redesigned, or removed.

Some environments, for example, may contain scheduled jobs or custom processes that create complex custom. A new IGA platform may support the same broad requirement without reproducing that behavior in the same way. You therefore need to understand the requirement and redesign it where necessary, rather than simply copy the existing technical process.

For organizations moving away from SAP IdM, this includes establishing exactly what IdM is doing today, including the custom logic, integrations, and dependencies built up over time. The same principle applies to broader transformation initiatives: understand the requirement first, then determine how the future platform should support it.

Discovery also exposes the quality of the identity and role model data underneath the technology. HR data is particularly important because attributes such as position, department, location, and employment status frequently determine which access should be assigned.

Those structures do not always map neatly to access. In a retail environment, for example, individuals could have several employment records with different employee IDs and positions. Your identity governance processes need to interpret those records and determine the required access.

Your target model should therefore create a clear relationship between the employee, their business role, the technical roles provisioned to applications, and the risks associated with that provisioned access. With all applications, including SAP, access should be granted following the Principle of Least Privilege to ensure that additional access isn't providing access to sensitive data, segregation of duties risks, or complexities for end-users in the front-end. 

If your identity source does not reliably tell the IGA platform who somebody is, which position they hold, and which attributes should drive access, automation simply scales the inconsistency and the complexity. Data quality and role design therefore need to be addressed before large parts of the employee lifecycle are automated.

Let requirements drive platform and integration design

Once you understand these requirements, you can assess platforms against what you actually need rather than allowing a product feature list to shape your target model.

Your assessment should cover the full application estate, lifecycle management, access governance, and risk. Hosting, data residency, and connectivity requirements also matter. If you have complex SAP access-risk requirements, you may need deeper SAP-specific governance alongside your enterprise identity platform.

Integrations need the same level of scrutiny. A connector appearing on a vendor's supported-integration list does not necessarily mean that it supports every provisioning action, attribute, or business process you need. You should understand what a connector can read and write, who supports it, and where additional configuration or development will be required.

In a highly customized SAP environment, an integration that works out of the box elsewhere may still need additional design because your existing provisioning processes behave differently than what out-of-the-box connections expect.

This is why platform selection should follow discovery. A strong feature list has limited value if the platform cannot support the identity sources, applications, provisioning behavior, and controls your organization needs. The aim is an enterprise model that integrates SAP properly, rather than a broad platform with only superficial SAP coverage.

Implement in phases and design for what happens next

Enterprise IGA does not need to be introduced through a single cutover. A phased approach is easier to manage and allows you to validate the model before introducing greater automation.

One option is to begin in read-only mode so identities, roles, and application connections can be checked before provisioning is enabled.

Another is to establish the core identity foundation first, connecting systems such as HR, Active Directory, Entra ID, and ServiceNow before onboarding more complex SAP applications.

Your sequence should reflect the scenario driving the program and any wider transformation work. If an S/4HANA or HR program is already redesigning roles, data, or organizational structures, your IGA program should align with those changes rather than build around structures that are about to disappear.

If SAP IdM replacement is one part of the program, the migration sequence should reflect the custom processes and dependencies uncovered during discovery. The objective is not to recreate IdM automatically, but to preserve the business requirements that still matter and redesign how they are delivered where appropriate.

Change management also needs to start during design. Administrators need to understand their new responsibilities, while managers and users need to know how access requests, approvals, and automated controls will work.

Your operating model must also explain how ongoing changes will be maintained. For example, if HR creates a new position and SAP creates an associated role, there must be a defined process for updating the IGA platform too.

Clear ownership across HR, IT, security, SAP te stops the identity model from drifting away from the organization after go-live. This is a common pitfall and should not be underestimated.

In summary: build the identity model first, then choose the technology

You will get much more from enterprise IGA if you treat it as an opportunity to create a consistent identity model across SAP and the wider application estate.

First, establish how identity and access are managed today, which requirements matter, and whether the underlying identity data and role structures are fit for purpose. You can then decide how SAP should sit within your wider enterprise identity model and what combination of enterprise and SAP-specific capabilities you need.

The end result should be an identity model that gives you clearer visibility of access, stronger lifecycle management, and a more consistent way to govern SAP alongside the rest of your enterprise.

Standalone in our expertise across SAP security, identity, and access governance, Turnkey Consulting help organizations design enterprise IGA strategies that work for SAP and non-SAP environments. Get in touch today to discuss how we can help you integrate SAP into your wider identity governance program.