How should organisations prepare for SAP user conferences when identity security and application access governance are the main concerns?

Why This Matters for Security Teams

SAP user conferences can surface useful product direction, but identity security and application access governance are rarely solved by product news alone. The real risk is that SAP access often sits inside a broader web of service accounts, integration users, privileged operators, and third-party connections that are not reviewed with the same discipline as human access. Current guidance from the OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 and NHIMG research shows why this matters: the Ultimate Guide to NHIs reports that 97% of NHIs carry excessive privileges, while 71% are not rotated within recommended time frames. For SAP environments, those patterns turn conference conversations into governance decisions about review cadence, elevated access, logging, and revocation.

Security teams should go into the event with a control lens, not a feature wishlist. That means testing whether access review workflows cover SAP roles, technical users, and adjacent integrations, and whether the organisation can actually prove who can do what, when, and under which approval path. The most useful sessions are often the ones that expose where legacy role design, custom transactions, and emergency access processes still depend on manual judgment. In practice, many security teams discover SAP access drift only after audit findings or a privileged account incident has already forced the issue.

How It Works in Practice

Preparation should start before the event. Build a short list of governance questions that map to the controls your team must defend: who approves privileged access, how often entitlements are recertified, how emergency access is time-bound, and how evidence is retained for audit. The NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 is useful here because it frames access governance as a repeatable risk and control activity, not a one-time cleanup. Use that structure to compare current SAP practice against the answers you get in practitioner sessions.

In SAP-heavy estates, the most valuable discussions usually focus on four areas:

• Role design and whether business roles are still overextended after years of customisation.
• Privileged access handling, including firefighter-style accounts, break-glass access, and session logging.
• Identity lifecycle controls for joiner-mover-leaver events, especially for contractors and administrators.
• Monitoring and evidence, so reviewers can confirm access changes were not just approved but actually enforced.

Use conference meetings to validate whether your current model can support automated recertification, segregation-of-duties checks, and consistent revocation across SAP and non-SAP systems. The Ultimate Guide to NHIs — Lifecycle Processes for Managing NHIs is a good reference for understanding how lifecycle discipline applies to service accounts and technical access, which often share the same control weaknesses as SAP integration users. A useful event outcome is not a vendor promise, but a concrete list of gaps to close in access review, approval routing, and privilege revocation. These controls tend to break down when SAP is heavily customised and identity data is split across IAM, GRC, and ticketing systems because no single team can see the full access path.

Common Variations and Edge Cases

Tighter access governance often increases operational friction, requiring organisations to balance auditability against the speed business users expect from SAP. That tradeoff is especially visible during month-end close, mergers, emergency support, and outsourced operations, where teams may be tempted to leave access standing rather than re-approve it. Best practice is evolving, but current guidance suggests that temporary elevation, stronger logging, and faster deprovisioning are safer than broad permanent access.

Edge cases matter. For example, an SAP role review that looks strong on paper can still fail if technical users, batch jobs, or middleware credentials are excluded from the review scope. Likewise, conference advice about “automation” should be tested carefully if the organisation lacks clean identity data, because automated approvals can simply scale bad role design. NHIMG’s Top 10 NHI Issues highlights how excessive privilege and poor rotation become persistent control failures when governance is fragmented.

For organisations with regulated reporting or strong audit pressure, the practical priority is not to eliminate every manual step, but to make exceptions explicit, time-limited, and reviewable. That is where SAP conference learning should be applied: to compare operating models, not slogans, and to determine whether access governance is evidence-driven enough to withstand scrutiny across the full enterprise estate.

Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group

• How should organisations extend access governance across complex application environments without losing control of compliance risk?
• How should security teams migrate identity governance from on premises platforms to cloud based identity security without disrupting access controls?
• What breaks when access certifications and lifecycle controls are missing from SAP identity governance?
• How should organisations scope an identity and access governance programme before they start implementation?