SAP GRC Auditing: Why It’s Crucial for Your Organization

SAP GRC Auditing: Why It’s Crucial for Your Organization

Most people hear the word “audit” and begin to tense up. That’s probably because it is typically used in the context of an IRS audit, and nobody wants that. However, an audit is simply an objective examination and evaluation, usually of financial records, and in this context, including systems, applications, and products as well. When you use an SAP landscape, you have the finest business architecture around. It only makes sense to make sure that it is performing at optimal levels. With good SAP Auditing, you will have no worries about governance, risk, or compliance (GRC).

SAP Governance Auditing

Enterprise Resource Planning systems (ERPs) are integrated programs that maintain all of a company’s transactions in a single database. They are key components of your SAP landscape whether you have SAP HANA or any other type. With your SAP landscape reflecting your particular business model, the roles and responsibilities of every agent in the organization is clear. SAP Audits can assess risks to the critical business data that is accessed by multiple users across the company. Inaccurate, invalid, or fraudulent data entered at one point can affect the accuracy of data across the system. Ideally, integration with SAP Risk Management and SAP Process Control will make the SAP Auditing process seamless. You will be able to gain precise insights and real-time analysis of potential problems.

Risk Auditing

Security audits are procedures that let an auditor trace a single transaction as it interacts across a range of connected applications. SAP internal security audit systems can automatically detect transactions that violate security protection protocols. SAP managers and internal auditors use security audits to search for fraudulent transactions, discover control system failures, and access violations. Other security concerns that auditors search for are unauthorized customer profile changes and unauthorized changes to master data files. SAP Auditing streamlines these processes with automated checks and mobile capabilities. That means the ability to assess risks at high speeds and clarify problematic situations keeps your business running smoothly.

Compliance Auditing

Companies have a duty to adhere to all state and federal regulations for their particular industry as well as to protect clients’ private information. SAP Auditing keeps them current with regulations and evaluates whether a business is complying with state and federal rules governing the privacy of information in the company’s control. Businesses that operate internationally are required to comply with any applicable international business and privacy regulations as well. With SAP Auditing, companies can be confident that their SAP systems protect the privacy of consumer information, employee information, and proprietary business information. SAP Auditing means that you have the internal controls demanded by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) too.

SAP Auditing keeps your company running smoothly and safely. It chooses high-value issues for further investigation. It empowers your internal auditors to conduct timely risk assessments, and it automates and accelerates the auditing process. With SAP Auditing, you have a simpler approach to creating, tracking, and managing audit issues. It also speeds up the resolution of those issues. Unlike an IRS audit, SAP Auditing allows you to relax, knowing that your SAP landscape is being monitored and objectively assessed.

CCMS in SAP Basis

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You have the finest enterprise resource planning (ERP) software available in SAP; now you need to know how to optimize its use. The best way forward is to use the Computing Center Management System (CCMS) to monitor, control, and configure your SAP system.

Monitoring

Your CCMS can conduct system-wide monitoring and automatic reporting. It produces alerts that are assigned a severity and color coded. One of the best attributes of the CCMS monitoring architecture is that it offers a flexible framework so that your specific business landscape can be monitored in the way best suited for you. Instead of one over-arching monitoring and administration program, elements of the monitoring architecture function largely independently of each other.

The CCMS alert monitor includes:
*Status indicators (green, yellow, red) for all components
*Alerts if a status indicator is not in the green range
*Easy access to methods for analyzing alerts
*Alert tracking and management
*Complete, detailed monitoring of the SAP system, host systems, and databases

It is important to note that the release of the 4.0 alert monitor has replaced the previous monitoring and alert system in the CCMS. This new monitor offers all of the functions that were available in the old alert monitor as well as new, more reliable alerts and more advanced and powerful features. CCMS is a feature of Solution Manager and while the capability, along with the software, is free, setup and maintenance is not and can be fairly pricy. Small- to Mid-sized SAP customers may fair better using a 3rd-party solution (like 1st Watch).

Controlling

Optimizing Log on Behaviors. Your CCMS can control how the whole system is being used and automatically improve efficiency by logon load balancing. Load distribution allows you to dynamically distribute SAP users across workprocesses. If you have specified work groups, you can increase their efficiency by setting up multiple logon workgroups. You can assign one or more application servers to certain workgroups or specific applications. When users log on to the system, they are automatically logged on to the server that currently has the best performance statistics or the fewest users. You can assign particularly important workgroups with time-sensitive transactions to application servers with better response times.

Background Processing.

Your CCMS can control the background processing of routine tasks, resource-intensive programs, or long-running programs. With the SAP system, you can choose from a variety of methods for scheduling and managing jobs. You can run both SAP-internal and external programs. And you can run related programs as “job steps” within a single background processing job. That way, a single background job can accomplish a complex task that consists of multiple processing steps.

Configuring

With your CCMS running, SAP Basis administrators can direct the configuration of SAP profiles. SAP profiles are operating system files that contain instance configuration information. Individual configuration parameters can be customized to the requirements of each instance. That means that the professionals at 1st Basis can use configuration parameters to delineate the runtime of elements like main memory size, or shared memory. Your CCMS can determine which work processes the instance itself provides and where other services like database hosts can be found. SAP materials advise that you use the CCMS to maintain configuration profiles. This means that you should not edit the active profiles directly at operating system level.

The CCMS really makes SAP Basis work best for your business. If you have questions or want to make sure that you’re getting the best possible performance of your SAP System, consult with the professionals at 1st Basis. We will assess how your CCMS is functioning and make any adjustments necessary.