SAP’s vast ecosystem of tech solutions has supported organizations for decades in achieving cross-functional planning and success. Securing tech stacks in legacy and modern SAP systems, hosted in hybrid or cloud-native environments, can be challenging, which is why vendors like SecurityBridge create solutions to simplify that process. CTO and Co-Founder Ivan Mans spoke with Channel Insider about the necessity for SAP-specific security tools and what customers should consider.
SecurityBridge automates the often tedious security approach to legacy tech
SecurityBridge provides a security platform for threat detection, vulnerability management, user monitoring, and compliance automation. The platform integrates fully with SAP to offer visibility into potential threats across the technology stack.
The company was founded in 2012 to tackle what Mans and his co-founder identified as a growing issue: organizations depended on outdated technology when modern threats were quickly surpassing the inherent capabilities of those solutions.
This bleeds into another key challenge Mans says SecurityBridge helps its customers work through: admitting there are security challenges in the first place.
“The challenge we often see is what I call the inconvenient truth,” said Mans. “We have to look at SAP experts in an organization and say, ‘there are some serious threats,’ and that can be hard to hear.”
“What we deal with a lot is how siloed organizations can be. The SAP side of the house might see security as a burden, but the CISO and security team often know there are issues and we can work with them on addressing those issues.”
Mans also said that the SecurityBridge platform is effective for customers because it automates many tasks, saving organizations time and money on manual work. This is appealing to all stakeholders, although it is particularly beneficial for those who do not typically work in security and may perceive securing their technology as a burden.
He emphasizes the importance of automation in everything the platform provides to customers, from compliance to threat detection and management. Plus, the company, like many in tech today, says it now leverages AI throughout the platform, taking that automation even further.
What SAP customers need to remember about securing their environments
As the SecurityBridge team helps thousands of customers secure their SAP environments, Mans has identified three key security priorities that apply to most, if not all, organizations.
“The most important thing is patch, patch, patch,” Mans said. “SAP requires manual patching that can often be a 10-day process. We automate that so it’s done in hours, and it’s so important to ensure that patching is done quickly across the environment.”
Mans’ other priorities include ensuring alignment with the SAP security baseline, a guide produced by SAP that can require extensive manual work for organizations seeking compliance. Additionally, SecurityBridge’s platform automates the auditing and implementation of SAP systems to ensure adherence to the baseline.
He also says more organizations need to “listen to their systems,” meaning that too many users still say “everything is fine” without actually checking whether their tech is operating correctly and securely.
Ultimately, Mans says SecuityBridge is focused on enabling SAP environments to succeed securely by ensuring that complex, legacy and modern tooling doesn’t require as much manual task completion.
The SAP ecosystem has fostered various companies supporting organizations with new tools and services. Learn more about how Bluestonex brings data governance and AI enablement to SAP customers.