Automate Monitoring and Analysis of SAP Transports with Pathlock Transport Control

SAP environments rely heavily on transports, which serve as a means of transferring changes between systems, implementing new functions, performing patches and updates, and installing third-party applications. Transports are crucial for effective change management processes in SAP. However, assessing their security risks across multiple SAP systems residing in complex, hybridized environments can be a challenge. Transport control solutions enable you to detect these risks, prioritize remediation, and meet compliance requirements by providing effective controls for risk mitigation.

Why SAP Transports Pose a Serious Risk

Most companies who use SAP applications may not regularly detect the deliberate or unintentional introduction of security risks through SAP transports. This is due to the ability to bypass compliance requirements, circumvent change log detection, and conceal other undesirable activities within transports. For instance, it is possible to:

• Manipulate or disclose data
• Execute insecure code during import
• Introduce security vulnerabilities into production systems
• Change user roles or authorizations
• Cause costly downtime for production SAP systems
• Grant access to unauthorized users
• Assign hidden SAP_ALL permissions
• Trigger import errors or downgrades that result in costly corrections, or even delete entire production systems

Given the multitude of potential security risks, it is crucial to continuously monitor transports and their associated security posture across all business-critical SAP systems. Due to the vast number of lines of code regularly transported, random checks are insufficient to provide adequate protection.

How Pathlock Enables Automated Transport Monitoring

Pathlock’s Transport Control module examines the content of transports during both export and import phases between development, QA, and production SAP systems. It conveys the findings to your SIEM solution of choice and enables real-time monitoring of transports, giving auditors focused insight on where to prioritize compliance efforts. 

Additionally, security administrators save valuable time with prioritizing remediation and patching efforts. With Pathlock, transports can be monitored in real-time by scrutinizing them for errors, vulnerabilities, and critical content before they are approved for deployment into production SAP systems during implementation.

Automatic identification and protection against vulnerable transports enable development teams to troubleshoot issues before compromising the quality, security, or compliance of production SAP systems, regardless of whether it involves poor coding, faulty configuration, or deliberate tampering. Some of the major advantages of using Pathlock Transport Control include:

• Saves security administrators countless hours and ensures configuration data does not leave your SAP system(s) boundary by automatically identifying, alerting, and prioritizing SAP transports containing critical vulnerabilities.

• Gives auditors continuous audit readiness to validate SAP security and compliance posture throughout the transport lifecycle. Auditors can also customize tickets per transport for control attestations in accordance with common regulations like SOX and GDPR, automating adherence to these and other frameworks.

• Saves developers time and resources by securely transporting code, user roles and authorizations, database content, and patching initiatives between SAP instances. The module automates continuous vulnerability scanning of transports in development, QA, and production systems.

Get in touch with our SAP experts to learn how you can holistically safeguard your SAP transport lifecycle and ensure continuous compliance.