SAP systems: Control user authorizations with a concept
Maintain derived roles
A troublesome scenario you're probably familiar with: You will soon be going live with a new business process and must now derive your roles in 97 accounting circles. Here eCATT can make your life easier. It's time again: If you don't have anyone in your department who likes to press the Copy button for several hours in the PFCG transaction, replace the Derive shortcut, and then customise the Organisation Levels (Origen) in the new roles on the Permissions tab (repeatedly connected to memory), the job will hang on you. Because there is hardly anything more boring, at the latest after one hour the first errors creep in. Whenever you have to roll out new roles, for example for your new premium business, to all your divisions, plants, etc. , the creation of the derived roles is tedious - because SAP does not offer smart mass maintenance. The SAP standard offers various ways to record and play on a massive scale. These tools are generally available for all operations in the SAP system, not just for role maintenance. Therefore, they are also more complex to operate, in order to be able to cover as flexibly as possible all possible application scenarios. eCATT is also no exception, so many users are still afraid to use it. But we can tell you from experience: After the second or third time, the creation of the test scripts is so quick that you'll wonder why you haven't always done it this way.
The daily business of an authorization administrator includes the checks and analyses of critical authorizations and combinations in the system. The focus is on users and roles in the respective clients and system rails. The SAP standard report RSUSR008_009_NEW is suitable for this purpose. You must first create corresponding check variants and authorization values for critical authorizations or combinations either using the program itself or transaction SU_VCUSRVARCOM_CHAN. These then correspond to your internal and external security guidelines. You can then run the report with your respective check scope and the corresponding critical authorization or combination variant and check in which roles or users such violations exist. This serves to protect your entire IT system landscape and should be carried out periodically.
ACCESS CONTROL | AUTHORIZATION MANAGEMENT FOR SAP®
To establish an efficient and consistent structure in the area of SAP authorization management, function-related role and authorization assignments are the be-all and end-all. In addition, the existing authorization concept must be constantly analyzed for changes and security-relevant errors through proactive monitoring. This prevents negative and highly security-critical effects on your entire system landscape. To make this task easier for you, Xiting provides you with a comprehensive analysis tool, the Xiting Role Profiler. In addition, you can perform a basic analysis in advance, which will also be the main focus of this blog. The goal is to show you SAP standard methods with which you can already independently optimize your authorization and role administration.
The role menu of the PFCG role now consists of folders that represent all logical links within a scope start page, and external services that represent the logical links and the area start pages themselves. This means that any external service listed in the Role Menu is eligible for a Area Start Page or Logical Link. If such an external service is removed from the role menu and the PFCG role is generated, the user of this PFCG role does not have permissions to view this external service (see screenshot next page). You will find duplicate, maybe even triple, entries from external services. These are mainly found in the folders of the homepage and under GENERIC_OP_LINKS. You can delete them without any concern, because an external service for a permission must appear only once in the Role menu. For a better overview, it is also useful to rename the external services or folders as they are shown in the SAP CRM Web Client.
During go-live, the assignment of necessary authorizations is particularly time-critical. The "Shortcut for SAP systems" application provides functions for this purpose, so that the go-live does not get bogged down because of missing authorizations.
Reduce administrative effort and ensure clarity in your compliance solution.
The website www.sap-corner.de offers a lot of useful information about SAP authorizations.
Not only the number of users is relevant, but also their classification, the so-called user types.