SIEM for SAP and Smart Data in Microsoft Sentinel
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SAP systems are the backbone of many enterprises, powering critical business processes ranging from finance to supply chain management. As such, they are prime targets for cyberattacks. Yet, integrating SAP security into the broader enterprise cybersecurity landscape remains a significant challenge.
Traditional SIEM platforms are designed for generic IT environments and struggle to interpret and correlate SAP-specific logs. SAP systems are highly complex, deeply customized, and leverage proprietary techniques and infrastructures. As a result, many SOCs operate with a significant blind spot: critical SAP security events either go unnoticed or are misinterpreted, leaving organizations exposed to sophisticated threats that specifically target business processes.
The sheer volume of SAP log data compounds the challenge. Not all events are security-relevant, and the context required to distinguish regular from malicious activity is often buried deep within SAP’s proprietary formats. This is where the concept of “smart data” becomes transformative and the compelling force behind the collaboration between SecurityBridge and Microsoft for integrating SIEM for SAP with Microsoft Sentinel.
Why is the traditional SIEM approach not effective for SAP?
CISO organizations and their cybersecurity teams rely on effective SIEM solutions for detecting, analyzing, and responding in real-time to threats within enterprise IT environments. Today, modern SIEM solutions leverage the “big data” approach to support SOC teams with real-time intelligence. All available data sources within the IT infrastructure that are relevant to cybersecurity, like security audit logs or trace files, are gathered into a central data hub and correlated to create a big picture of the threat status.
However, this traditional SIEM approach often struggles to interpret SAP security logs due to their unique formats and the specialized knowledge required to understand SAP-specific threats. Therefore, it is not very effective to let the SOC team define and maintain threat detection rules for SAP environments. The lack of business context, understanding of user authorizations, and system vulnerabilities makes it hard to find malicious activities in the SAP system.
SAP systems also generate vast amounts of log data, but not all of this data is relevant for security monitoring. As SIEM solutions are typically priced based on log volume, and up to 90% of SAP Security audit log records are usually considered to be irrelevant or “background noise”, it is certainly not a good deal to pay for 100% of the data while using only 10% of it.
Ideally, irrelevant data is already filtered out at the source level, but critical log records are enriched with contextual information, correlated with others or across SAP systems, and prioritized based on risk and business impact. The most efficient way to filter SAP Security audit logs while preserving and enriching the events’ context is by performing this in the SAP systems and by SAP administrators or security experts.
Why did SecurityBridge and Microsoft join forces?
SecurityBridge Threat Detection can transform and correlate raw SAP audit logs into meaningful and decision-enabling messages for SOC teams, including mitigation guidance for a swift and effective incident response process. SecurityBidge also combines Threat Detection with HyperLogging technology and provides powerful forensic capabilities to uncover even the most sophisticated attack patterns in SAP environments.
Microsoft Sentinel is a leading SIEM solution used by SOC teams to detect and respond to cybersecurity incidents across the entire IT infrastructure. To provide the same user experience also for SAP environments, Microsoft teamed up with SecurityBridge.
This integration allows SecurityBridge to seamlessly forward pre-filtered and categorized SAP security events enriched with context information into Microsoft Sentinel. Combining SAP Security expertise and SAP business context with Microsoft Security Copilot capabilities, this smart data approach enables organizations to identify sophisticated attack patterns that span both SAP and non-SAP environments, providing a unified threat detection framework.
SOC analysts now have access to easily understandable and decision-enabling SAP security events, reducing complexity and improving response times. Microsoft’s unified dashboard provides a comprehensive, real-time overview of risks across the enterprise.
The Future of SAP Security: Unified, Intelligent, and Actionable
As cyber threats continue to evolve, the smart data integration of SAP security into enterprise SIEM platforms reduces alert fatigue and enables SOC analysts to focus on genuine threats. The SecurityBridge and Microsoft Sentinel partnership delivers a solution that is both technically advanced and operationally practical.
By making SAP security events accessible, actionable, and understandable, smart data strategies and modern SIEM integrations empower SOC teams to be more effective in threat detection and more efficient in their response. This shift not only protects the digital core of the business but also enables organizations to confidently navigate an increasingly complex threat landscape.
The journey toward unified, intelligent SAP security is underway, and the benefits are clear: faster detection, fewer false positives, streamlined operations, and, above all, a stronger defense for the systems that matter most.
Contact us, and we will be happy to tell you more about our smart data approach for SOC teams. For more SAP security-related news, articles, and whitepapers, please follow us on LinkedIn!
