$5 million per attack! This is the average cost of an SAP breach. Not including the cost of the reputational damage such a breach might cause.
SAP is part of the essential basic IT equipment for many companies. As an omnipresent backbone, the ERP system is necessary for smooth business operations in many places. If it were paralyzed in the event of a hacker attack such as a ransomware attack, this would have serious consequences - up to and including the failure of the entire operational technology (OT). Enter Microsoft Sentinel, a cloud-native SIEM solution seamlessly integrating with SAP, and providing robust security monitoring, threat detection, and incident response capabilities for the organization.
In this blog, we will explore Sentinel for SAP, advantages, top components and why it can be considered the SIEM for business transformation. Let us dive in.
Table of Contents
Understanding SAP Security
Having multiple interconnected systems, custom applications, and complex workflows, SAP ecosystems require a lot of specialized security monitoring capabilities. There are thousands of events across various modules, user activities, and system changes that security teams now need to monitor. Traditional security approaches often fall short in providing comprehensive visibility across these diverse components, creating potential blind spots that attackers can exploit.
For which managed SAP security services have evolved significantly. But the integration of Sentinel brings unprecedented advantages to the table.
Microsoft Sentinel for Improved SAP Security
The security operations (SecOps) teams may have a challenging time monitoring the SAP ecosystem since it manages vast quantities of sensitive data hosted across Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Amazon Web Services (AWS), or on-premises infrastructures. Imagine a breach in the SAP system – it could result in exposed sensitive data, stolen information and even a disrupted supply chain. Microsoft Sentinel solution widens the scope for monitoring, detecting, and responding to suspicious activities and cyber-attacks across all SAP system layers.
Explore new-age business opportunities with Cloud4C’s SAP on Azure solution.
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Let us take a closer look:
Benefits of Microsoft Sentinel for SAP
Sentinel for SAP offers flexible customization capabilities to widen standard functionalities with custom scenarios and regulations. It also allows collection of valuable security info needed to perform threat analytics and threat hunting. Other benefits of Microsoft Sentinel for SAP include:
- Security Effectiveness: Integrated with SAP, it seamlessly collects and correlates business and application logs from SAP systems, enabling proactive detection and response to potential threats. This helps create flexible threat detection rules and detect a broader range of threats across the entire infrastructure.
- Monitoring All SAP System Layers: Gaining visibility across business logic, application, database, and operating system layers with integrated tools for suspicious activity investigation and threat detection.
- Real-time Threat Detection: A primary benefit of Sentinel is its capability to monitor SAP systems in real time. Activities like privilege escalation, unauthorized data modifications, sensitive transactions, and suspicious data downloads can be accurately detected and prevented. This immediate detection is critical to act on threats before they escalate into significant incidents.
- All Round Visibility: Sentinel provides a centralized dashboard – what that does is, it consolidates security data from across the organization, including SAP and non-SAP environments allowing security experts to understand the overall security posture better.
- Automated Incident Response: If there is a security incident, Microsoft Sentinel’s automated response capabilities help react to threats without manual intervention, quickly.
- Compliance and Audit Capabilities: Compliance always being a critical concern, Microsoft Sentinel by providing detailed audit trails and reporting capabilities, ensures that organizations remain compliant and meet regulatory requirements.
- Reduced Maintenance Effort: With reduced on-premises infrastructure and powerful storage automation capabilities, Microsoft Sentinel allows performing less maintenance tasks and spending more time adding value to the business.
To know more, download our whitepaper “Transform your business with SAP on Azure”
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Key Components of Microsoft Sentinel for SAP
- Data Connector: The data connector helps bring data from an SAP system to Microsoft Sentinel. It works as a Docker container installed on a virtual machine or a physical server. With a ready-made data connector, there is no need to build custom functionality to retrieve the SAP data, significantly saving the implementation time.
- Analytics Rules and Watchlists: There are various built-in rules available alongside the ability to create custom ones, to detect possible incidents and alert security respondents.
- Workbooks: Both pre-built workbook templates and custom workbook creation are available for interactive data visualization.
- Watchlists: These enable customization of the built-in solution parameters.
- Playbooks: Helps automate and simplify the security orchestration.
Microsoft Sentinel for SAP is certified for SAP S/4HANA Cloud, Private Edition RISE with SAP and SAP S/4 on-premises. It also enables integration with various products and platforms and provides customizable configurations to meet specific security monitoring needs.
Planning SAP ECC to S/4HANA Conversion: A Step-by-Step Guide
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Microsoft Sentinel Detects Threats Inside SAP: But how?
Let’s consider a sample of an attack scenario to understand the prevention capabilities of the Microsoft Sentinel SAP security:
- The threat actor wants to access the SAP ecosystem. They will most likely attempt to find some active user's login details. Sentinel will alert the system about this suspicious activity.
- If a password is found, the attacker will access SAP and check the available user permissions – what sources of sensitive information they can access and modify. Sentinel will alert the system if a user reviews more documents than permitted for this account.
- The threat actor may try to extend available permissions to make more changes in the system and data. Microsoft Sentinel strongly controls permissions, so any attempts to modify rights will be detected and alerted upon.
This way, the attack will be alerted on each step. Microsoft Sentinel is a typical SIEM system, its primary goal is threat control and monitoring. The response to alerts is the role of SOAR.
Getting Started: With Cloud4C’s Sentinel Solutions for SAP
Cyber threats continue to evolve, in both sophistication and frequency, the integration of robust SIEM solutions for SAP landscapes has become a critical success factor for most businesses in their transformation initiatives. With such high stakes, the security of these systems can’t be left to chance. Which is why most businesses are turning to Microsoft Sentinel – built specifically to handle SAP’s security demands, real-time threat detection and quick response capabilities, and deep integration with SAP modules.
Cloud4C is a certified Gold Microsoft partner and premium SAP partner. As a trusted provider of managed SAP security services, Cloud4C combines Sentinel’s advanced capabilities with expert oversight. With 600+ Azure certified resources engaged from the onset, 475+ SAP Implementations and 1000+ SAP Production Workloads, Cloud4C experts are equipped and ready to provide sentinel services for your SAP ecosystem. Without having to spend a lot of money on big, in-house security teams, Cloud4C's managed SAP security services enable companies to maintain strong security postures through proactive incident response, 24/7 monitoring, and customized security playbooks. SAP environments are seamlessly protected thanks to the combination of Azure Sentinel's capabilities and Cloud4C's experience.
But here's the thing - we know security isn't just about having the right tools. It's about having the right partner who's been there, done that, and knows exactly what to watch out for.
Beyond Sentinel integration, Cloud4C offers a complete portfolio of SAP security services, including vulnerability management, identity and access management and more. Our holistic approach to SAP security ensures that organizations can focus on their core business objectives while we help maintain the highest levels of security and compliance across the entire SAP landscape.
Intrigued? Confused? Want to know more? Contact us today!
Frequently Asked Questions:
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What is Sentinel tool used for?
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Microsoft Sentinel is a cloud-native SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) and SOAR (Security Orchestration Automated Response) tool. It is used for real-time threat detection, proactive hunting, and security incident response across enterprise environments, to help organizations collect, analyze, and correlate data from multiple sources like SAP, cloud platforms, and on-premises systems.
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How does Microsoft Sentinel collect data?
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Sentinel collects data through built-in connectors and custom data ingestion methods. It integrates seamlessly with various platforms, including Azure, AWS, SAP, and on-premises systems. The tool uses Log Analytics Workspaces to gather security events, activity logs, and telemetry data from across cloud services, network devices, and applications.
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What is the new name of Microsoft Sentinel?
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Microsoft Sentinel retains its original name after its rebranding in 2021 from "Azure Sentinel" to "Microsoft Sentinel." It reflects its role as a cloud-native, cross-platform SIEM solution, designed to provide security monitoring, threat detection, and automated response across diverse IT ecosystems. Sentinel remains one of the leading security tools for integrating security information management and orchestration.
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Is Microsoft Sentinel a SIEM or XDR?
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Microsoft Sentinel is primarily a cloud-native SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) solution that also offers SOAR (Security Orchestration Automated Response) capabilities. While it focuses on advanced threat detection, monitoring, and incident response, it can be integrated with Microsoft’s XDR (Extended Detection and Response) platform, Microsoft Defender, for a comprehensive security solution.
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What is a SIEM vs SOC?
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A SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) tool, like Microsoft Sentinel, collects and analyzes security data to detect threats. While an SOC (Security Operations Center) is a team or facility that monitors, detects, and responds to these security incidents using tools like SIEM. While SIEM provides the technology for threat detection, the SOC is responsible for managing and responding to those threats, often with the help of managed security services providers.
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Can I run SAP on Azure?
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SAP can fully run on Microsoft Azure, one of the leading cloud platforms for hosting SAP HANA, SAP S/4HANA, and other SAP workloads. Azure allows businesses to optimize their SAP environments while reducing infrastructure costs. Businesses can seamlessly move their SAP systems to Azure, ensuring high availability, disaster recovery, and integration with advanced security tools like Microsoft Sentinel.
