Risk rises when custom code, integrations, and data cleanup happen at the same time as business process change. That combination makes it easy to move obsolete access, weak approvals, and bad reference data into the new environment unless controls are revalidated against the target design.
Why This Matters for Security Teams
SAP migration is not a routine platform swap. It is a control reset point where identity stores, approval paths, technical accounts, service integrations, and reference data can all change at once. That combination creates the highest risk window for IAM and controls teams because the target design is still being built while legacy access often remains active long enough to be copied forward. NIST’s NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 reinforces the need to map identity and access controls to a defined target state rather than assuming continuity through migration.
For NHIs, that risk is usually amplified by technical debt. Shared service accounts, hard-coded secrets, and integration dependencies often survive long after business users think the cutover is complete. NHIMG’s Top 10 NHI Issues highlights how secrets sprawl and poor ownership become control failures during change events, not just steady-state weaknesses. The real issue is not whether access existed before migration, but whether it still makes sense after business roles, interfaces, and data structures have changed. In practice, many security teams encounter privilege drift only after the new SAP environment is already live and users begin operating around the intended controls.
How It Works in Practice
The highest-risk phase is usually the overlap period: code remediation, interface rewiring, master data cleanup, and role redesign are all happening together. In that window, teams tend to preserve old access to avoid blocking testing or cutover, which means obsolete entitlements, stale approvals, and oversized technical privileges can flow into the new system. Current guidance suggests treating migration as a re-certification event, not an access transfer exercise.
Practically, that means IAM and controls teams should validate four things in the target design before production cutover:
- Who should have access in the new SAP process, not who had access in the old one.
- Which service accounts, interface IDs, and batch credentials are still required.
- Which approvals are still valid after business process redesign and segregation-of-duties changes.
- Which reference data, including vendor, customer, and material masters, can trigger downstream access or payment risk.
This is also where non-human identity governance becomes material. If integrations still rely on static credentials, migration can silently copy insecure secrets into the target environment. NHIMG’s Ultimate Guide to NHIs explains why legacy secrets and unclear ownership are recurring failure points, while the OWASP NHI Top 10 provides useful language for secret exposure, orphaned identities, and privilege misuse. Controls are strongest when teams reconcile identities against the future-state process model, then revoke anything that is not explicitly reapproved. These controls tend to break down when cutover is compressed and business owners insist on temporary exceptions that are never fully removed.
Common Variations and Edge Cases
Tighter migration control often increases project friction, requiring organisations to balance cutover speed against assurance. That tradeoff becomes especially sharp when SAP transformation is tied to a merger, tax replatforming, or cloud hosting change, because one delay can affect multiple business streams. Best practice is evolving, but current guidance still favors explicit exception tracking, short-lived migration access, and post-cutover recertification over blanket continuity.
Some environments add extra complexity. In global SAP landscapes, local role variants and country-specific approval rules can hide privilege overlap until after go-live. In regulated industries, a “temporary” emergency account often survives because operations cannot tolerate interruption. In hybrid estates, non-SAP applications may keep trusting the old SAP identity model through interfaces, which means decommissioning has to be coordinated across systems, not just within SAP.
NHIMG’s 2024 ESG Report: Managing Non-Human Identities reports that 72% of organisations have experienced or suspect a breach of non-human identities, which is a useful reminder that migration is often where hidden access problems become visible. The safest approach is to treat every non-human credential, approval, and entitlement as suspect until it is proven necessary in the target design. Where business teams demand speed, the controls team should insist on a documented rollback path and a defined owner for each exception.
Standards & Framework Alignment
This section maps relevant standards and security frameworks to the operational risks and controls described in this guidance.
OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 address the attack and risk surface, while NIST CSF 2.0 and NIST AI RMF set the governance and control requirements practitioners need to meet.
| Framework | Control / Reference | Relevance |
|---|---|---|
| NIST CSF 2.0 | PR.AA-01 | Migration risk centers on validating identities and access against the new target state. |
| OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 | NHI-03 | Static secrets and copied technical accounts are common SAP migration failure points. |
| NIST AI RMF | Migration is a governance and accountability event requiring defined ownership and oversight. |
Reconcile SAP roles, service accounts, and exceptions to the future-state access model before cutover.
