The Endless Cycle of ERP Security
In the movie Groundhog Day, Bill Murray’s character begins to go mad from reliving the same day over and over again. For IT teams, this plot can be quite similar to securing ERP systems. Security is a process and securing ERP systems is addressed by people following processes. There is this continual cycle of finding and remediating vulnerabilities, sometimes even the same ones that have already been remediated before. This can be extremely challenging and frustrating for all those involved in keeping business-critical ERP systems, such as Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) and SAP applications, available and secure.
For Oracle EBS and your organization’s most critical business applications, security begins during the application development cycle.
- DBAs and application developers are configuring these applications with system parameters, settings and access rights
- Information security (InfoSec) and internal IT audit teams perform assessments and find problems with the way the system is configured
- DBAs and application developers fix the issues that security and audit have found, plus make the myriad of changes the business wants
- InfoSec and audit find yet more issues – either because of new vulnerabilities that have emerged, or because of the changes requested by the business
So, once again, the DBAs and application developers are back spending more time fixing yet another issue while other projects keep piling up.
Yes, the process of security is continuous and may even seem endless. But, it can be made much more efficient for you as DBAs and application developers. Here’s how:
It’s vital for everyone to have the same visibility into ERP application security vulnerabilities and the associated risk throughout the cycle. When the DBAs, application team, InfoSec and IT audit are all on the same page and seeing the same things, this monotonous reactive cycle becomes more proactive. This cross-functional visibility will reduce much of the time you spend on unnecessary repetitive work to keep the business-critical applications available and protected.
The Onapsis Security Platform for Oracle EBS provides that visibility by automating the monitoring and protection of Oracle EBS and business-critical applications. You can now stay one step ahead of the security and IT audit teams by making sure security patches are configured properly, addressing insecure system parameters and identifying risky user authorizations as you find them rather than are told about them.
Onapsis can help make your remediation process more efficient and strengthen it to secure the ERP system. To get started, we offer our Business Risk Illustration for Oracle EBS, or in layman’s term an assessment, that can quickly find vulnerabilities and identify risk in your critical business applications. When you see the results, you’ll be able to prioritize your remediation cycle based upon levels of criticality. If you’re interested, we can demonstrate this to the entire team responsible for Oracle EBS security, including InfoSec, IT audit, your CIO and, of course, yourself. Let’s schedule a time to talk.
In upcoming posts, we will address the specific pain points of InfoSec, IT audit and the CIO in keeping Oracle EBS protected and compliant.