Security teams should centralise identity data, standardise review workflows, and automate approval collection so reviewers see one complete access picture across SAP and connected apps. Prioritise role-based review campaigns, real-time risk scoring, and immediate corrective actions for high-risk access. The goal is to reduce spreadsheet dependency, shorten review cycles, and close audit gaps before reporting deadlines.
Why This Matters for Security Teams
Automating access reviews across SAP and connected applications is not just an audit efficiency problem. It is an identity governance problem with a large non-human blast radius. SAP estates often sit at the centre of finance, procurement, and HR workflows, while connected apps inherit entitlements through integrations, service accounts, and delegated access. Without a complete identity picture, reviewers approve stale, excessive, or orphaned access simply because the evidence is fragmented.
The control objective is to move from spreadsheet-based review chasing to authoritative, workflow-driven certification. That means centralising identity data, mapping inherited entitlements, and making revocation actionable at the point of decision. NHIMG research shows that only 5.7% of organisations have full visibility into their service accounts, and 97% of NHIs carry excessive privileges, which is exactly why access reviews fail when they are treated as a quarterly clerical task rather than an ongoing control. See the Ultimate Guide to NHIs and the OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 for the governance risks that sit behind these review failures.
In practice, many security teams discover the access review gap only after an audit exception, a failed certification campaign, or a production incident has already exposed the blind spot.
How It Works in Practice
Effective automation starts with identity consolidation. SAP roles, groups, technical accounts, API tokens, SSO entitlements, and downstream app permissions need to be normalised into one review record so managers and control owners can see both direct and inherited access. For SAP, that often means combining role catalogues with user-to-role mappings and then enriching them with connected application data from IAM, PAM, and SaaS governance tools.
The review workflow should then assign the right approver based on business ownership, not system ownership alone. Current guidance suggests using role-based review campaigns for low-risk access, but risk-based routing for privileged, sensitive, or dormant access. Reviewers should receive context such as last login, SoD conflicts, ticket history, and whether access is tied to a service account or integration. Where possible, use policy-based automation so obvious decisions can be auto-approved or auto-revoked subject to guardrails. NIST control language in NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 Security and Privacy Controls supports access review discipline, while the NHI Lifecycle Management Guide explains why revocation and rotation must be part of the same operating model.
- Normalise SAP and non-SAP entitlements into one certified view.
- Score access by privilege, inactivity, data sensitivity, and integration type.
- Route sensitive access to the actual business owner with full context.
- Trigger immediate remediation for high-risk or clearly invalid access.
- Feed revocation results back into the system of record so the next campaign starts clean.
For connected applications, especially where SAP drives downstream provisioning, automation should verify that removal in one system propagates to all dependent entitlements. These controls tend to break down when SAP is tightly customised and downstream application ownership is split across business units because entitlement lineage becomes hard to prove.
Common Variations and Edge Cases
Tighter review automation often increases operational overhead at first, requiring organisations to balance faster certification cycles against cleanup of poor entitlement data. The best result comes from starting with the highest-risk populations first: privileged SAP users, shared accounts, service accounts, and integrations that can move data or create financial impact. That is also where manual review fatigue causes the most risk.
There is no universal standard for how much should be auto-approved versus manually certified. Best practice is evolving toward policy-driven thresholds, but organisations should be careful not to let automation rubber-stamp access simply because a user has not changed roles recently. For third-party and integration-heavy environments, the review scope must include OAuth grants, API keys, and delegated admin paths, not just named users. See NHIMG’s 52 NHI Breaches Analysis and the SAP Breach for examples of how overlooked technical access turns into enterprise exposure.
In highly customised SAP landscapes, the main edge case is indirect access through middleware and job schedulers, where the apparent user is not the real actor. Those environments need extra lineage mapping, or automated reviews will miss the account that actually performs the action.
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, NIST SP 800-63, NIST Zero Trust (SP 800-207) and NIST AI RMF set the governance and control requirements practitioners need to meet.
| Framework | Control / Reference | Relevance |
|---|---|---|
| OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 | NHI-01 | Access reviews must cover service accounts, tokens, and inherited NHI entitlements. |
| NIST CSF 2.0 | PR.AC-4 | Supports periodic access review and least-privilege enforcement across applications. |
| NIST SP 800-63 | Identity proofing and lifecycle assurance matter when certifying who should retain access. | |
| NIST Zero Trust (SP 800-207) | AC-4 | Zero Trust supports context-aware decisions instead of blind standing access approvals. |
| NIST AI RMF | GOVERN | Automation needs governance, accountability, and human oversight for high-risk decisions. |
Tie access certification to authoritative identity attributes and current employment status.
Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group
- How should enterprises automate segregation of duties reviews across SAP and connected business applications?
- How should security teams run access reviews for non-human identities?
- How should security teams automate user access reviews without losing control quality?
- How should security teams govern access across SAP and business applications?
Deepen Your Knowledge
Reviewed and updated by the NHIMG editorial team on August 26, 2026.
NHI Mgmt Group — the #1 independent authority on Non-Human Identity, IAM, and Agentic AI security. nhimg.org
