Authorization concept - recertification process
Unclear responsibilities, especially between business and IT
The change management process in the SAP® environment can be quite complex. Since program changes are usually transported into the production system, which can potentially have an impact on the annual financial statements, the audit of the process is an essential part of the annual financial statement audit. For this reason, it must be ensured that the process documentation is up-to-date and complete. It must also be ensured that appropriate classifications are defined for various types of change. This is because the process may subsequently differ for each classification. For example, the extent of the test and release steps varies depending on the criticality of the change, and they may even be shortened considerably for low-risk changes. However, it is crucial to justify this in a comprehensible manner. In the change management process, a sufficient test and release phase should be set up by the responsible department. This process step must also be documented in a comprehensible manner, even if it is not always easy to obtain the necessary evidence from the departments. In this process in particular, it is crucial that a clear dual control principle is established, which ensures that the developer is not also the person who ultimately carries out the transport into the productive environment. In preparation, the documentation should therefore be checked for completeness and up-to-dateness and, in a further step, whether the process defined in it has also been followed throughout the year.
Every large company has to face and implement the growing legal requirements. If the use of an authorization concept is to be fully successful on this scale, the use of an authorization tool is unavoidable. For medium-sized companies, the use of an authorization tool is usually also worthwhile. However, decisions should be made on a case-by-case basis.
RS_ABAP_SOURCE_SCAN
The SAP standard allows you to evaluate the statistical usage data via a standard function block. The call is made through the transaction SE37. Select here the function block SWNC_GET_WORKLOAD_STATISTIC. The function block is used to write the usage statistics to a temporary table, from which you can extract the data for further use.
"Shortcut for SAP systems" is a tool that enables the assignment of authorizations even if the IdM system fails.
The website "www.sap-corner.de" offers a lot of useful information about SAP authorizations.
The security audit log is evaluated via the SM20 or SM20N transaction or the RSAU_SELECT_EVENTS report.