Security with dashboards

The globally active DAX company Linde, with over 50 productive SAP systems and 30,000 users worldwide, needs to keep track of the visibility of critical events in real time. This is where a new complete security solution, as implemented by Linde with the security experts from Sast Solutions, can help. The insight: Sophisticated dashboards are an indispensable part of this. 

Hardening of all landscapes

The Sast Solutions team used a three-step approach: First, an analysis of current vulnerabilities was performed. In the second step, the gaps were closed. Thanks to agile process management with five teams working in parallel, all landscapes were hardened in just 16 months - from configuration to cleaning up all RFC interfaces, from gateway hardening to the elimination of critical basic authorizations.

Finally, the third step was to ensure that no new security vulnerabilities were created. The final step was therefore to set up the Sast Suite for real-time monitoring, including the standard connection of a sophisticated security dashboard.

The Security Dashboard visualizes information about the variety of different systems and responsibilities as well as deviations in a target group-oriented manner and enables a uniform top-down view of the achieved security and compliance standard - in real time.

In addition, the solution can not only show where there is a problem, but also provide a recommendation for action at the same time. Ralf Kempf, CTO of Sast Solutions, comments: "In practice, a customer needs to monitor the result of 2000 individual check actions from 300 SAP systems on a daily basis, for example, identifying vulnerabilities through critical configurations and conspicuous usage. This can only be done easily and in real time with a dashboard that offers the possibility to navigate through various levels down to the details of the alarm message."

For example, the security dashboard must allow data to be combined depending on the situation, regardless of the area, and visualize reporting for both the IT security area and system managers.

Ralf Kempf explains: "A system manager in particular needs a simple overview at the first level with just two traffic lights: one for the configuration and authorizations area, the second for SIEM/real-time monitoring. He then simply orients himself to this information, knows immediately in which area he needs to take action - and receives details of the incidents and corresponding recommendations for action in real time at the click of a button."

According to specialist Kempf, practice shows that even large customers with only a few employees can monitor all SAP systems worldwide in real time if they use complete solutions such as Sast Suite in combination with a dashboard.

For Linde, the transparent overview and extensive analysis options have immediately proven their worth, as Andreas Feistl, Team Lead - GRC Operations at Linde, notes: "We have been able to significantly reduce the probability of critical events occurring. And we are now able to react to events much faster."