The Business Benefits of RISE with SAP: Don’t Overlook Security
RISE with SAP is a commercial transformation that bundles a modern ERP core, innovation tools, and process intelligence into a single service. Its true business value is not in the contract itself, but in the specific financial levers it unlocks: reducing Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) via a “Clean Core,” accelerating innovation revenue via SAP BTP, and protecting operating margins through process efficiency.
However, these financial gains are theoretical until the system is live and secure. Security failures, specifically project delays, data breaches, and the “manual tax” of compliance, are the primary “Anti-ROI” that threatens to erase the value of your investment.
The 3 Strategic Drivers of RISE (The “Sum of Parts”)
To understand the ROI of RISE, you must look at the financial impact of its three primary components.
1. Agility via the “Clean Core” (The TCO Driver)
The most significant long-term financial benefit of the RISE methodology is the Clean Core strategy. By decoupling custom code from the core ERP, organizations significantly reduce their technical debt.
- Strategic Value: Upgrades transform from high-risk, multi-year projects into routine, low-cost “non-events.”
- Financial Impact: This directly lowers Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) by reducing ongoing maintenance costs and freeing up developer capacity.
- The Enabler: This strategy relies on effective SAP DevSecOps. You cannot maintain a clean core if you migrate legacy, vulnerable code into your new environment.
2. Innovation via SAP BTP (The Revenue Driver)
SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) is the innovation engine included in your RISE subscription. It allows you to build extensions side-by-side with your ERP to drive new business value.
- Strategic Value: It enables the rapid development of AI-driven apps and automations without destabilizing the core ERP.
- Financial Impact: Leverage a 514% ROI Capability. RISE includes consumption credits for SAP BTP, a platform that independent IDC analysis shows can deliver a 514% 3-year ROI. While this return is specific to BTP capabilities rather than the full RISE contract, the subscription empowers you to capture this value by building revenue-generating apps and automations side-by-side with your ERP.
- The Enabler: Securing BTP is the customer’s responsibility. SAP BTP Security is essential to ensuring these new innovations do not introduce breach risks.
3. Process Intelligence via Signavio (The Efficiency Driver)
SAP Signavio provides the data-driven blueprint for your transformation, using process mining to identify inefficiencies.
- Strategic Value: It prevents the “lift and shift” of bad processes.
- Financial Impact: Operational Margin Improvement. By optimizing business processes before migration, you ensure the new cloud environment runs leaner and more efficiently from Day 1.
The “Anti-ROI”: How Security Failures Destroy Value
While the potential ROI of these components is high, the “downside risk” is catastrophic. A single major security failure can erase the Net Present Value (NPV) of the entire transformation.
Risk 1: The Cost of a Breach (The “JLR” Reality)
Migrating “crown jewel” applications to the cloud creates a high-value target. A breach here costs far more than the project’s projected savings.
- Global/US Average: According to the 2025 IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report, while the global average cost of a data breach is $4.44 million, the average cost in the U.S. has hit an all-time high of $10.22 million.
- Enterprise Reality: For large enterprises, the cost is much higher. A large Automotive Manufacturer recently estimated a $260 million impact from a cyber disruption. A loss of this magnitude negates years of the operational efficiency gains promised by RISE.
Risk 2: The “Manual Tax” of Compliance
Moving to a hybrid cloud landscape often explodes manual audit costs if not managed correctly.
- The Stat: KPMG reports that the average annual cost of a manual SOX program has risen to $2.3 million, often requiring over 15,000 hours of labor.
- The Reality: This recurring cost acts as a drag on both productivity and corporate finances. If your RISE transformation increases your manual audit workload, you are eroding the productivity gains you promised the board.
The Solution: The Onapsis Secure RISE Accelerator
To protect your ROI, you need a framework that secures the specific value drivers of RISE. The Onapsis Secure RISE Accelerator is a comprehensive bundle of SAP-endorsed technology designed to accelerate and de-risk your transformation.
It combines four key components to cover the entire landscape (ABAP, HANA, UI5, JAVA, SAProuter, and SAP BTP), including threat intel from Onapsis Research Labs, the world’s leading SAP threat research team:
- Onapsis Assess: Vulnerability management for legacy and RISE assets.
- Onapsis Control: Code security testing and change management.
- Onapsis Defend: Real-time threat monitoring.
- Comply Packs: Automated compliance reporting to eliminate manual audit efforts.
Security Embedded Into the 6 Phases of SAP Activate
The Accelerator integrates directly into the SAP Activate methodology, taking the guesswork out of security at every step.
| Phase | Objective | The Challenge | The Solution |
| 1. Discover | Assess capabilities and align to future business needs. | Addressing confusion regarding RISE security roles and identifying critical code issues or insecure configurations in legacy systems. | Use Onapsis Assess to scope known security needs and identify areas to improve risk posture via transformation, preventing legacy risks from becoming migration blockers. |
| 2. Prepare | Initial project planning and roadmap. | De-risking potential delays resulting from unplanned SAP security issues and aligning security roles with appropriate resources. | The Accelerator ensures you have the specialized SAP cybersecurity insights needed to align governance early, preventing timeline slippage due to resource gaps. |
| 3. Explore | Validate solution scope and plans. | Understanding potential risk roadblocks and getting clarity on required configurations to enable security controls. | Validate that AppSec plans are complete and establish proper code test plans. This ensures you understand exactly which configurations are needed to remain compliant. |
| 4. Realize | Build, configure, and test. | Building secure code and verifying the security of third-party work. | Use Onapsis Control to scan all new BTP extensions and ABAP code during development. This validates your security posture throughout the build phase, ensuring new systems are compliant by design. |
| 5. Deploy | Readiness for Go-Live. | Ensuring the new landscape is free of code security issues for a smooth, delay-free launch. | Validate that all security controls and monitoring are in place before the switch is flipped, managing the compliance and security of phased deployments. |
| 6. Run | System stability and continuous value. | Maintaining continuous threat detection and enforcing Clean Core principles. | Onapsis Defend provides real-time monitoring to stay ahead of threat actors. Simultaneously, Comply Packs (an add-on to Onapsis Assess) automate manual compliance efforts, reducing the growth inhibitors of ongoing audits. |
Case Study: How a Fortune 500 Utility Protected Their Migration
This secure framework is the exact approach a Fortune 500 utility company used to protect its transformation.
- The Challenge: Migrating a 20-year-old legacy SAP system to a new “greenfield” RISE environment while facing strict regulatory requirements.
- The Solution: They embedded the Onapsis Platform from Day 1 to scan code and secure BTP extensions.
- The Results:
- 75% reduction in Mean-Time-To-Remediate (MTTR) vulnerabilities (Efficiency ROI).
- 50% reduction in security investigation time.
- Zero project delays due to security or code quality issues (Cost Avoidance).
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
What is the primary driver of ROI in a RISE with SAP transformation?
The financial return comes from two main sources: TCO Reduction and Innovation Revenue. By adopting a “Clean Core” strategy, you drastically lower the operating expense (OpEx) of future upgrades and maintenance. Simultaneously, using SAP BTP allows you to build revenue-generating applications that deploy faster than traditional ERP customizations.
Does a “Lift and Shift” migration still deliver business value?
Migrating to the cloud offers infrastructure flexibility, but if you “lift and shift” legacy customizations and vulnerabilities, you transfer your technical debt to the cloud. This erodes the TCO benefits of the Clean Core. To realize the full ROI, you must scan and clean your code before migration (during the Discover phase) to ensure you aren’t paying to host inefficient, insecure assets.
Does SAP accept financial liability if a breach impacts our project’s ROI?
No. Under the Shared Responsibility Model, SAP’s liability is limited to the infrastructure. If a breach occurs due to your custom code, user access, or configuration, which are the most common attack vectors, you bear 100% of the cost. A single breach ($10.22M avg) can erase the projected Net Present Value (NPV) of your entire transformation.
We have a limited budget. Is security an added cost or an ROI enabler?
Security is an ROI enabler because it eliminates the “Manual Tax” of compliance. Manual SOX audits can cost enterprises $2.3M annually. By using the Onapsis Secure RISE Accelerator to automate these controls, you permanently reduce your operating costs, directly improving the margins of your new cloud environment.