Why Governing SAP ERP with IGA is Better on the Now Platform

Clear Skye has announced a new certified ServiceNow Store application for SAP Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP R3). This application allows for the governance and lifecycle management of SAP R3 systems directly within ServiceNow.

The biggest benefit here is agility in today’s digitally transformed and hyper-competitive world. To make data-driven decisions in a competitive market, leadership needs full visibility into all areas of the business – including but not limited to IT operations, customer trends, risk, and corporate compliance. When those business lines are siloed, it’s impossible to gain this visibility without writing custom integrations and running custom reports.

You might ask, why this is better than every other IGA system that already has SAP integration?

• Traditional IGA systems (whether they are hosted, on-prem or SaaS) are not used by business leaders to make informed decisions that directly affect the direction of the business. ServiceNow is.
• Traditional IGA systems do not provide tiered security incident response workflows, remediation and risk dashboards used by your security first line of defense. ServiceNow is.
• Traditional IGA systems are not used as change management workflows, managing and providing access when a change or migration is needed. ServiceNow is.
• Traditional IGA systems are not used by C-level executives to view the state of corporate compliance. ServiceNow is.
• Traditional IGA systems are not the de-facto place to request access to organizational IT assets from desktop, mobile or virtual agents. ServiceNow is.

How Clear Skye for SAP ERP and ServiceNow IRM Strengthen Enterprise Security

It’s clear that ServiceNow provides much more than ITSM. It’s the platform for business workflows for many organizations. That includes security.

Security plays an essential role in today’s ultra-connected, open B2B and B2C corporate environments, and IGA plays a supporting yet critical role in an organization’s overall security operations. Providing a holistic view of security – including SAP security – helps ensure compliance, manages risk, and provides real-time information on CIO dashboards. This ensures that key aspects of SAP security are surfaced through Now applications, such as ServiceNow Governance, Risk, and Compliance. Together, these form part of the Integration Risk Management application.

An IRM program’s function is to provide enterprise-wide transparency into risks and issue management. A common IRM approach to creating such transparency is to develop Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) processes that are administered across an organization. GRC enables the organization to align to corporate objectives, proactively identify risk, detect abnormalities quickly, and effectively respond to risk events. Doing this consistently creates visibility into overall risk posture and increases the likelihood of achieving corporate objectives.

Together, Clear Skye for SAP ERP and ServiceNow IRM provide this transparency through dashboards, scheduled and interactive reports, and reviews into who has access to what within SAP ERP. This helps you hit your target level of SAP ERP compliance.

The operational efficiency of Clear Skye for SAP ERP also contributes to improved compliance. Tasks such as SAP user account provisioning, SAP Role/Profile membership management, and end user requests can all be configured according to defined IGA access policies – ensuring that every action meets compliance requirements.

Leveraging the Agility of the Now Platform

Let’s get back to agility. This is a critical reason SAP ERP with IGA works better on ServiceNow.  

Clear Skye’s approach to identity governance and administration is to run IGA natively on the Now Platform. You know that by now.

What you may not know is that executing IGA workflows in the same business context as your other ServiceNow business application workflows introduces much-needed innovation into the identity market.  

Running native to the Now Platform gives Clear Skye IGA access to the entire ServiceNow data plane, now including SAP ERP R3 – all without the extra customization work. The agility of the Now Platform and the power of Clear Skye IGA enable business leaders to review what they need, when they need it. This modern approach to security and identity enriches digital workflows and helps enterprise support the transformation they’re looking for.

Clear Skye for SAP ERP is available today in the ServiceNow Store. View our listing to request a trial or contact us to learn more.

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