3 Ways To Secure SAP SuccessFactors And Stay Compliant

This blog was originally published by Lookout here.

Written by Steve Banda, Senior Manager, Security Solutions, Lookout.

The work-from-anywhere economy has opened up the possibility for your human resources team to source the best talent from anywhere. To scale their operations, organizations are leveraging the cloud to accelerate essential HR functions such as recruiting, onboarding, evaluating and more.

SAP is leading this HR transformation with its human capital management (HCM) solution, SAP SuccessFactors. Delivering HR solutions from the cloud enables employees and administrators to not only automate typical tasks, such as providing a report on employee attrition, but also allows them to complete these tasks from anywhere and on any device.

SuccessFactors makes it easy for employees to access what they need. But the wide range of sensitive employee data within SuccessFactors creates additional security and compliance challenges. Whether it’s personal and financial information used for payroll or health information for benefits, you need the right cybersecurity to ensure that sensitive data even when it leaves your corporate office perimeters.

To help your organization take full advantage of SuccessFactors in a secure way and stay compliant with regulations, I want to outline some of the challenges cloud-based HCM creates and why you need security built specifically for your cloud app.

Why you need cloud security for SuccessFactors

There’s *a lot* of sensitive data in there

SuccessFactors offers a number of features that streamline HR operations, such as compensation and benefits — both of which can be complex to secure. With 12 unique modules, SuccessFactors functions like a multi-cloud environment, making it more challenging to control how data is accessed. And because of its breadth of features, the HCM also handles a diverse array of sensitive and private data, such as financial data, protected health information (PHI) and personally identifiable information (PII).

You don’t know what’s happening anymore

Just like any cloud application, SuccessFactors’ end-users and administrators are increasingly using unmanaged devices and networks to connect and sidestep perimeter-based security — which means IT and security teams no longer have visibility into how users are interacting with the app, the risks on their devices and how they are handling sensitive data. This makes it nearly impossible for security teams to know whether an endpoint contains malware or a user’s account has been compromised.

Leveraging SuccessFactors provides huge upside for your HR operations but only if it’s secure — a breach could severely damage your brand and violate compliance regulations. With perimeter-based security no longer effective, you need a solution that understands SuccessFactors and can secure it regardless of how people are connecting and the data involved.

Safeguard SuccessFactors

1. User behavior monitoring: detect threats and support audits

Due to the sensitive nature of the data SuccessFactors handles, staying compliant with regulations is key. It’s critical for an organization to have a solution in place that understands how its users are interact with the application, detect malicious activities and provide a paper trail for auditing purposes.

2. Safeguard sensitive data and block malware

When it comes to keeping your data safe, having visibility into user behavior is just one piece of the puzzle. It’s just as important to understand how sensitive or malicious a piece of data is across all devices. With this information, you can determine whether to revoke access or block the data from leaking out whether it is shared online or downloaded.

3. Granular and dynamic policy enforcement

The difficulty in securing SuccessFactors isn’t just the visibility. You also need a security solution that can fully leverage the user, data and device telemetry data to enforce policies. In a remote-first environment, there are countless situations an organization needs to account for, such as how a user behaves, the risk levels of their device, what type of network they’re on and the data they’re looking to access.