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Branden Newman joins the SecurityBridge Board of Advisors

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SecurityBridge
September 25, 2020
3 min read
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Branden Newman

We are excited to expand our blog article on the recent appointment of Branden Newman to ABEX’s Board of Advisors. See his video here giving insight on his motivation and common mistakes that he has identified as the enemy of SAP security and IT operations.

Branden, tell us about your background

His answer was

My background includes over 20 years’ experience across military government and corporate environments. Some of my more prominent roles include leading the security operation center for army cyber command. Leading the information security for Merck group and most recently, I served as the CISO for adidas.

Why is SAP Security so important?

His answer was

Securing SAP applications is so important due to the critical business processes it supports. I see many times that security is neglected on applications that security professionals don’t fully understand, and SAP is one of them. As a consequence, I see many companies that are neglecting security on SAP, too. Even though it is one of the most important applications in the enterprise.

SecurityBridge is a modern SAP Security Platform, natively build in SAP.  It uses an ABAP based Intrusion Detection System (IDS) to guard your SAP landscape 24/7. Its frontend is build with Fiori, which provides you an intelligent insight on the security posture of your ABAP, Java and HANA based systems.

Why choose SecurityBridge over other products?

His answer was

I selected SecurityBridge due to its comprehensive feature-set from code scanning to security monitoring, and in addition to the fact that it’s native to the SAP application stack itself. This leads to a very simple implementation that doesn’t have any external components.

It’s very important to have an integrated platform because it doesn’t require any external bolt-on systems or integrations across the environment. Each of these increases complexity which is an enemy of security and IT operations.

Whenever you add this, bolt-on components for security, then you’re actually increasing the complexity and the attack surfaces. This is not a friend of security or IT operations. When it’s fully integrated it gives you the ability to apply all the security controls you need in a single platform that’s integrated into SAP itself.

Why did you join the ABEX Advisory Board?

His answer was

I joined the ABEX Advisory Board because I believe in the product. I believe there’s a significant gap in the security industry for securing SAP applications, and I think that my experience can help further the product and have a beneficial impact on the security industry as a whole.