Beyond SAP Access Control: Why Your Hybrid Landscape Needs Cross-Application GRC

KeyTakeways

The Firewall is Not Enough: SAP security now extends to cloud-based “islands” like Ariba and SuccessFactors. Legacy tools built for on-premise ECC cannot see or manage risks that cross between these platforms.

The Danger of “Identity Sprawl”: Users often accumulate excessive permissions as they move between different cloud modules. Without a unified GRC view, cross-system Segregation of Duties (SoD) conflicts go undetected.

Shift to Risk-Aware Access: Moving beyond static Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), modern GRC uses contextual factors (location, time, device) and behavioral analytics to block threats in real-time.

Centralized Policy is Mandatory: To scale, organizations must define access rules in one central hub that pushes policies out to all connected systems, ensuring “one version of the truth” for audits.

Automation via Diligent UAS: Built on SAP BTP, the User Access Shield (UAS) bridges the gap by providing automated provisioning, centralized SoD enforcement, and continuous monitoring across the entire hybrid SAP estate.

Introduction

SAP security is no longer confined to a single system behind a firewall. With platforms like Ariba, Concur, and SuccessFactors extending the SAP ecosystem, access now stretches across cloud services, business units, and third-party integrations. Yet many organizations still rely on traditional SAP Access Control built for static, on-premise environments. This misalignment is creating visibility gaps and escalating risk.

As the SAP landscape grows more hybrid, threat actors are exploiting exposed touchpoints faster than legacy controls can adapt. Governance models must evolve with this shift. The focus now moves beyond siloed SAP tools toward unified, cross-application GRC, where access risk is managed holistically, not system by system.

Gaps in Legacy SAP Access Governance

As hybrid SAP landscapes expand across cloud services like Ariba, Concur, and SuccessFactors, many enterprises still depend on legacy governance tools designed for on-premise models. This misalignment leaves access blind spots unaddressed and risk unmanaged at scale.

Built for Static SAP Environments: Legacy access control frameworks were designed for ABAP-based systems and static landscapes. While effective for internal segregation-of-duties enforcement, they don’t account for distributed roles or decentralized app usage.
Disconnected from Cloud and Third-Party Systems: Native coverage rarely extends to cloud platforms like Ariba, Concur, or SuccessFactors. Integrating third-party apps is even harder. Without centralized visibility, access risks and provisioning inconsistencies go unchecked.
Isolated Risk Evaluation: Controls stop at system boundaries. When risk is calculated only within SAP modules, cross-application conflicts are easily missed, especially when users hold roles across multiple platforms or environments.
Heavy Reliance on Manual Governance: Review cycles often involve spreadsheets and emails, with little workflow automation or policy intelligence. This slows down audits, makes compliance reporting burdensome, and leaves more room for error.
No Real-Time Insight or Scale: Access risk is often uncovered too late, during audits or incidents. As digital adoption accelerates, these tools struggle to scale access governance across dynamic teams, regions, and business units.

Navigating Identity and Compliance in Hybrid SAP Landscapes

As SAP environments extend across both on-premise and cloud platforms like Ariba, Concur, and SuccessFactors, keeping access governance consistent becomes harder to sustain. Identity sprawl, siloed monitoring, and mismatched controls start to surface, well beyond what older SAP GRC tools were built to manage.

Here are the growing pain points hybrid SAP landscapes now face:

Disconnected Security Postures
On-premise SAP often relies on hardened firewall policies and well-established access protocols. In contrast, cloud platforms might launch with open configurations or inconsistent hardening standards. Without unified security baselines, risk exposure grows unevenly across the estate.
Fragmented Identity Management
Users frequently hold multiple roles across systems, resulting in misaligned privileges. A finance user may retain excessive permissions in ECC even after being onboarded into a cloud-based CRM or HR system. Without centralized IAM oversight, dormant or conflicting entitlements go unchecked.
Exposed Integration Points
APIs connecting cloud and on-prem SAP systems carry critical data but are often weakly secured. A poorly configured integration, for example, between ECC and a third-party procurement tool can become an attack vector, especially if token access or audit trails aren’t in place.
Siloed Monitoring and Alerting
SAP monitoring tools often remain isolated within environments. A suspicious login from a cloud system may never correlate with data access activity on-prem, allowing threat actors to move laterally unnoticed.
Acceleration Outpacing Control
As organizations adopt RISE with SAP or expand into cloud services, transformation often moves faster than governance controls. In these scenarios, teams may rely heavily on partners or integrators without clear visibility into how access and compliance controls are applied.

Centralized Cross-Application GRC: An Integrated Approach

As application ecosystems grow more distributed, managing governance across SAP and non-SAP systems has become a critical priority. A siloed approach to access control no longer works when users operate across on-prem environments, SaaS platforms, and multiple business systems. Enterprises are increasingly turning to centralized GRC strategies to gain consistent control across the landscape.

The shift is toward platforms that provide unified visibility and policy enforcement, regardless of where the applications reside. Instead of managing access rules in isolation for each system, governance is consolidated, so risks are evaluated holistically, not in fragments.

Here’s how centralized cross-application GRC helps organizations regain control:

Consistent Policy Enforcement Across Environments
Defining access rules and SoD policies in one place ensures that every connected system, on-premise or cloud, follows the same governance logic. This removes policy drift and reduces manual oversight.
Cross-Platform Risk Correlation
Instead of managing risks in silos, GRC platforms can detect access conflicts that span systems. For example, a user might have elevated roles in both SAP and a third-party HR application, triggering a conflict that legacy tools would miss.
Centralized Compliance Visibility
Real-time risk data from all systems flows into a single dashboard. This eliminates fragmented reporting and enables audit teams to generate complete, audit-ready reports across the entire IT landscape.
Adaptable to IT and Business Change
As more applications enter the ecosystem, centralized GRC scales easily. New systems integrate into the existing control framework, so governance keeps pace with business transformation.

From Role-Based to Risk-Aware Access Controls

Role-based access control (RBAC) has long been the backbone of SAP security, assigning users to predefined roles based on their job titles or departments. While this method establishes baseline safeguards, it often lacks the nuance needed for today’s hybrid, cloud-integrated enterprises.

As organizations operate across geographies, devices, and time zones, RBAC begins to show strain. Static roles can’t always capture the dynamic nature of modern access risks. For example, the same user might need different permissions depending on their device, location, or business context.

To strengthen oversight, more organizations are adopting risk-aware access controls that introduce contextual and behavioral factors into the equation:

Contextual Attributes: Access rules consider location, time, device, and other factors. A user may be allowed to initiate high-risk SAP transactions only during work hours and from an approved device or network.
Real-Time Activity Logging: Monitoring what users actually do after logging in offers a second layer of defense. Tracking access to sensitive tables or unusual transactions helps flag insider threats that role assignments alone won’t catch.
Anomaly Detection: Modern access governance tools increasingly use behavioral analytics to detect deviations from normal usage, like sudden spikes in download activity or first-time access to high-privilege functions.

Strengthening Cross-Application Control with Diligent UAS

To operationalize this advanced model, enterprises need tools that can enforce policy at scale, while adapting to context and monitoring in real time. Diligent Global’s User Access Shield (UAS) is one such platform, engineered specifically to modernize access governance across SAP systems.

Built on SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP), UAS unifies access provisioning, enforcement, and monitoring into a centralized framework. It enables teams to manage user permissions with precision, automate SoD policy checks, and enforce least-privilege models from the moment a user is onboarded.

Key capabilities of UAS include:

Centralized SoD Enforcement: UAS applies organization-wide Segregation of Duties (SoD) rules across systems, catching potential conflicts before access is granted.
Automated Role Provisioning: Users are assigned to roles based on business rules or job function templates, reducing overprovisioning and manual errors.
Dynamic Access Controls: Permissions can shift based on context, like time of access, location, or user behavior, ensuring sensitive actions are only performed under secure conditions.
Continuous Monitoring and Alerts: UAS logs all critical user activities, flags suspicious behavior, and provides real-time alerts when violations occur.

Redefining GRC for the Hybrid SAP Era

Modern SAP environments demand more than legacy access controls. As cloud adoption accelerates and threats grow more sophisticated, enterprises must shift to risk-aware, cross-application governance that spans every system users touch. From centralized policy enforcement to real-time activity monitoring, the future of GRC lies in unified platforms that adapt to your landscape.

Ready to rethink your SAP access governance? Book a personalized demo of Diligent UAS and explore how to modernize GRC across your entire enterprise stack.