Security Operations Centers (SOCs) are designed to detect, analyze, and respond to threats across an organization’s digital landscape. However, when it comes to SAP environments, most SOC teams find themselves navigating uniquely challenging terrain. This is worth a closer look.
SAP systems power some of the most critical business processes - finance, supply chain, and HR - making them high-value targets. Yet monitoring and responding to SAP-related security events is far from straightforward.
One major challenge is that traditional security tools - SIEMs, EDRs, and network monitoring platforms - are typically optimized for standard IT environments, not complex enterprise applications like SAP. SAP logs are often stored in proprietary formats, requiring specialized tools to extract, convert, and integrate them into SIEM solutions.
This leads directly to the next challenge: SAP systems generate large volumes of log data. Forwarding all of it to the SOC without context would quickly result in information overload and contribute to alert fatigue. It can also become a cost concern, as some solutions charge based on data volume or bandwidth.
As an initial conclusion, SOCs need “SAP-savvy” tooling that delivers pre-qualified events enriched with relevant context. This forms a more practical basis for analysis and decision-making.
Another challenge lies in the nature of the events themselves. SOCs are used to handling technical indicators such as malware infections, repeated failed logins, brute-force attempts, suspicious login locations, or connections to known malicious IPs.
SAP, by contrast, primarily generates business-centric events. These might include a user executing an unusual transaction, activation of or login with a service account, creation of high-privilege users, and read/write access to sensitive database tables.
This is where things become particularly complex.
On one side, SAP’s authorization model is notoriously intricate. Roles, profiles, and authorizations are layered in ways that can be difficult even for experienced SAP administrators to fully understand. For SOC analysts without deep SAP expertise, this creates a significant barrier.
On the other side, IT teams and SAP teams are often separated organizationally, with little to no overlap. As a result, SOC analysts typically lack visibility into ongoing SAP activities. Is a server reboot part of a planned update? Was the SAP* user activated for urgent maintenance? Was a weekend login necessary to resolve a business-critical issue?
The situation becomes even more complicated when systems are operated by third parties, for example through SAP RISE. In such setups, external providers may perform actions in the system without consistently informing the SOC in advance or responding quickly to inquiries.
Beyond determining whether an SAP event is malicious or part of normal operations, the key question remains: what action should the SOC take?
While there are some SAP events that SOCs can perfectly understand and handle effectively - such as brute-force login attempts - many others require deep SAP expertise. This expertise is not acquired quickly. In order to quickly respond, a SOC would also need access to all SAP systems in the company. Highly privileged access.
Would SAP teams be willing to grant such access to teams with limited SAP knowledge? This question was discussed at this year’s Cyber Defense Round Table in Frankfurt, with sobering results. None of the participating organizations let their SOCs handle SAP incidents directly, citing the high risk of operational disruption. Businesses depend heavily on the availability and integrity of their SAP systems.
There is currently discussion to use AI in order to guide SOC teams or even directly interact with SAP systems. While approaches based on LLMs and RAG might be acceptable for explaining the nature of certain SAP events, deploying autonomous agents in SAP environments would be similar to giving a monkey control over a warehouse. And you certainly want no monkey in your SAP systems.
In summary, a traditional SOC is generally not well suited to fully understand, let alone respond to, SAP-specific incidents. Even with the right tools. Incorporating SAP security expertise into the SOC would be ideal. Unfortunately such experts are scarce and expensive. Moreover, most experienced SAP security professionals are not inclined to take on continuous on-call responsibilities, such as nights or weekends.
