CMC Tabs Advantage
SAP authorizations
Better technologies have expanded the role of SAP Basis Administrators, paralleling the IT industry as a whole. It's no longer enough to keep the system running and performing well. An SAP HANA Basis Administrator also plays a role in cost control, IT strategy and even business policy.
The security of an SAP system requires protection against unauthorised access, e.g. through the secinfo and reginfo files. A cleanly implemented authorisation concept protects against attacks within the SAP system. However, it is also possible to attack your SAP system via the network. Through the RFC Gateway Server, your system communicates with external servers and programmes. One particularly effective way to protect against this are so-called Access Control Lists (ACL). Find out what this is and how you can use it to better protect your SAP system. The SAP Standard offers different approaches for gate protection. All methods combined can provide even greater safety. For example, it is possible to use Access Control Lists (ACL) to monitor exactly which external programmes and which hosts can communicate with the gateway. Another option is to configure the gateway to support Secure Network Communication (SNC). Finally, there are various security parameters for the gateway. This article focuses on the use of ACL files such as secinfo and reginfo files. What is an ACL? Access control lists are files in which permitted or prohibited communication partners can be recorded. For the gateway to use these ACL files, parameters must be set in the default profile of the SAP system and of course the files must be maintained accordingly. With the help of logs and traces, which can be configured for this purpose, a precise investigation can be made in advance of the activation, which connections currently run via the gateway. This allows them to prevent important applications with which your system communicates from being blocked by the ACL files. The rules in the ACL files are read from top to bottom of the gateway to decide whether to allow a communication request. If none of the rules matches the requesting programme, it will be blocked. Network-based ACL The network-based ACL file contains permitted and prohibited subnets or specific clients.
Introduction & Best Practices
If all tasks considered to be an interface theme are supported by the SAPBasis, this means a very wide range of tasks. Here it is necessary not to overwhelm the own employees within the SAP basis and to keep the complexity of different topics and technologies manageable per capita. Therefore, a corresponding growth is associated with this interface task. This recommendation is general and does not apply only to the SAP basis.
An SAP HANA system lives on applications. When you develop these applications, you should think about securing them early. Using HTTPS instead of HTTP is one of the basics. In addition, you ensure secure authentication and implement a Secure Software Development Lifecycle to ensure backup in your own developments. In your applications, you better start to check them for risks early on and run this backup process regularly. You can analyse and restrict access to source code later. Create a risk register and address security vulnerabilities in a risk-based manner. The later you discover a risk, the more expensive the fix will be. Further information on SAP Security in addition to the article can be found here. Do you have any further questions or suggestions concerning this topic? Would you like us to go further on the subject? I look forward to your feedback!
Tools such as "Shortcut for SAP Systems" are extremely useful in basic administration.
You can implement the functionality into your existing SAP landscape without additional licence costs and with moderate effort.
Basis is responsible for the smooth operation of the SAP Basis system and thus for R/3 and SAP ERP, for example.