Is Your Organization Overlooking These Common SAP Security Risks?
- September 17, 2026
SAP systems contain some of an organization’s most valuable and sensitive information. Financial data, customer records, employee information, supplier details, intellectual property, and business-critical processes can all flow through the SAP landscape. That makes SAP security an organization-wide concern.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- Unpatched SAP systems remain a significant security risk, and integrations are expanding the attack surface.
- Identity and access require continuous attention. Excessive privileges, compromised credentials, dormant accounts, and segregation-of-duties conflicts can create pathways to sensitive SAP data and transactions.
- Security monitoring needs SAP-specific visibility. Traditional enterprise security tools may not provide security teams with sufficient context about SAP applications, transactions, users, and vulnerabilities.
- Transformation is an opportunity to improve security. SAP S/4HANA and cloud initiatives should incorporate security into architecture and process decisions from the beginning rather than treating it as a pre-go-live exercise.
A compromised SAP environment can potentially affect financial transactions, supply chain operations, regulatory compliance, business continuity, and the integrity of enterprise data. And as organizations modernize SAP environments through cloud adoption, integrations, APIs, and AI, the potential attack surface is changing.
The threat isn’t hypothetical. SAPinsider’s Cybersecurity Threats and Challenges to SAP Systems 2025 found that 23% of respondents had experienced a credential compromise or social engineering attack, malware or ransomware attack, or another cybersecurity attack that impacted their SAP environment during the previous year.
Understanding common SAP security risks is therefore an important first step. The bigger challenge is identifying where seemingly routine practices are creating vulnerabilities that organizations may not recognize until something goes wrong.
7 COMMON SAP SECURITY RISKS
Falling Behind on Security Patches
Patching sounds straightforward: SAP identifies a vulnerability, releases a Security Note, and organizations apply the appropriate remediation. In practice, however, the process can be considerably more complicated. SAP environments are highly interconnected, and patches often need to be evaluated, tested, scheduled, and deployed without disrupting critical business processes. That can lead organizations to delay remediation.
According to cybersecurity research, 35% of respondents identify keeping up with SAP security patches and updates as a top challenge—the leading challenge for the third consecutive year. Among organizations struggling with patching, 64% cited difficulty scheduling downtime, while 57% cited difficulty validating whether patches had been correctly applied.
The need for disciplined patch management isn’t slowing down. For example, SAP’s July 2026 Security Patch Day included 16 new Security Notes and one GitHub security advisory, along with updates to three previously released notes. The releases included a CVSS 9.9 critical memory corruption vulnerability affecting SAP NetWeaver Application Server ABAP. Earlier in 2026, SAP’s February Patch Day included 26 new Security Notes, including critical vulnerabilities affecting SAP CRM, SAP S/4HANA, and SAP NetWeaver Application Server ABAP.
The warning sign isn’t simply having outstanding patches. It’s lacking a risk-based process for determining which vulnerabilities affect the organization’s landscape, how urgently they need remediation, who owns the decision, and how quickly patches can be validated and deployed.
Excessive Access and Weak Identity Controls
An organization can have excellent perimeter security and still expose itself to significant risk if users have more SAP access than they need. Say an employee changes jobs but retains privileges from a previous role; a temporary elevated-access request becomes permanent; a contractor’s account remains active after an engagement; or technical and service accounts receive broad privileges because narrowing them is inconvenient. Individual roles may appear reasonable, while combinations of roles create segregation-of-duties conflicts. Over time, these exceptions can become normal.
Moreover, research found that 28% of respondents identified ensuring segregation of duties as a top SAP cybersecurity challenge. Among organizations with the least mature cybersecurity posture, that number rose to 43%. As such, organizations should evaluate access controls not only around what legitimate employees are permitted to do but also around what an attacker could do if those credentials were compromised. Can the account access sensitive financial or employee data? Could it change a supplier’s banking information? Create or modify users? Execute privileged transactions? Access production? Circumvent an approval process? Strong identity governance, least-privilege access, periodic access reviews, segregation-of-duties monitoring, multifactor authentication where appropriate, and disciplined privileged-access management can help limit the impact of compromised credentials.
Underestimating the Risk of Connected Systems
Modern SAP environments don’t exist in isolation. They connect with cloud applications, suppliers, banks, customers, warehouses, analytics platforms, middleware, APIs, third-party solutions, and other enterprise systems. Every connection creates business value but potentially also another path into or out of the environment.
One of the most notable findings in SAPinsider’s 2025 cybersecurity research was the increasing concern around those connections. Connections to other systems and applications moved from the tenth-ranked SAP security threat in the previous year’s research to the third-largest threat in 2025. At the same time, respondents ranked data exfiltration as their biggest threat to SAP systems.
Organizations should know which systems connect to SAP, what information those connections can access, how identities are authenticated, where credentials are stored, whether traffic is appropriately protected, and who owns each integration. Legacy interfaces deserve particular attention. An interface that has operated quietly for years can escape security reviews even as the technologies and security assumptions around it change.
Similarly, connections created quickly during acquisitions or transformation programs may remain long after their original purpose changes. Maintaining an accurate inventory of integrations and regularly reviewing those trust relationships should be part of SAP security governance.
Treating Security as Primarily an Authorization Problem
Roles and authorizations are essential, but SAP security is broader than access control. Organizations also need to consider vulnerabilities, insecure configurations, application-layer threats, custom code, interfaces, operating systems and databases, cloud services, privileged users, and data movement. That’s particularly important because attackers are actively targeting vulnerabilities in business-critical SAP technology.
In 2025, for example, researchers identified critical vulnerabilities in SAP NetWeaver that were being actively exploited. Onapsis reported that more than 4,000 affected systems were directly reachable from the internet and estimated that 50-70% had the vulnerable component present when the attack campaign began. Intelligence indicated that hundreds of SAP systems had been compromised. The lesson here is straightforward: a clean segregation-of-duties report doesn’t necessarily mean the SAP environment is secure.
Custom Code That Escapes Security Scrutiny
Custom code often exists because an organization has a legitimate business requirement that standard functionality doesn’t address. But every custom development can also introduce risk. The danger increases when code was created years ago, documentation is incomplete, original developers are no longer available, or security requirements have changed since the application was built.
Custom applications and extensions should be reviewed for secure coding practices, authorization checks, data exposure, input validation, and known vulnerabilities in underlying components. This is especially important during SAP S/4HANA transformation. Organizations have an opportunity to ask whether existing customizations still provide enough business value to justify maintaining them—and their associated security footprint—in the future environment.
Security Teams Don’t Have Enough Visibility
Your security operations center may monitor network traffic, endpoints, identities, cloud environments, and enterprise applications. But how much does it actually see inside SAP? Research found that 28% of respondents identified a lack of visibility of SAP systems within InfoSec or Security Operations as a major challenge. That gap matters because unusual behavior in SAP may require application-specific context. A security team needs to be able to distinguish an ordinary business transaction from suspicious privilege escalation, unusual administrative activity, unexpected changes, or attempts to access sensitive information.
SAP teams and cybersecurity teams should not operate as separate worlds. Security operations should understand which SAP systems are business-critical, what sensitive information they contain, which vulnerabilities matter most, what normal activity looks like, and how an SAP-related incident should be escalated. Likewise, SAP teams should understand the organization’s broader incident-response, threat-detection, vulnerability-management, and security-governance processes.
Assuming the Cloud Automatically Solves Security
Moving SAP workloads to the cloud changes security responsibilities, but it doesn’t eliminate them. Cloud providers and SAP may manage certain infrastructure and platform responsibilities depending on the service model, but customers still need to understand their responsibilities for areas such as identities, roles, configurations, integrations, data, extensions, and business processes.
The shift toward hybrid landscapes can actually make understanding those responsibilities more important. An organization may simultaneously operate SAP S/4HANA Cloud, SAP BAIP, legacy on-premise applications, SaaS solutions, hyperscaler infrastructure, and third-party systems. Each platform can have different controls and ownership models. The risk emerges when everyone assumes someone else is responsible.
Organizations should explicitly document security responsibilities across SAP, internal teams, implementation partners, cloud providers, and other vendors.
HOW CAN ORGANIZATIONS REDUCE SAP SECURITY RISKS?
There is no single control that makes an SAP landscape secure, but a strong approach combines governance, technology, processes, and clear accountability.
Organizations should establish an accurate inventory of SAP systems and integrations, regularly assess vulnerabilities, prioritize and apply security patches, enforce least-privilege access, monitor segregation-of-duties conflicts, review custom code, remove unnecessary accounts and interfaces, and integrate SAP activity into enterprise security monitoring.
They should also establish clear ownership. Who evaluates new SAP Security Notes? Who decides how quickly a critical vulnerability must be patched? Who reviews privileged accounts? Who monitors integrations? Who investigates suspicious activity? Who coordinates response if an incident crosses SAP and non-SAP systems? Security becomes much more difficult when those answers are ambiguous.
LOOKING AHEAD
The most important shift organizations can make is to stop thinking about SAP security risks exclusively as technical vulnerabilities. SAP supports business processes, meaning a security issue affecting an SAP system can therefore become a finance problem, a supply chain problem, a compliance problem, an employee-data problem, a customer problem, or a business-continuity problem.
The goal shouldn’t be to eliminate every possible SAP security risk. The goal is to understand where the most consequential risks exist, make them visible to the right people, and establish controls capable of identifying and addressing them before they become incidents.