Online, offline, delta backups
Implementation of applications
People tend to forget how important this element of the architecture is. The setup involved often proves to be especially important for companies looking to implement the SAP system for the first time.
Each SAP Basis system must be controlled and managed by an administrator. This person is responsible for the smooth operation of the system. This can be an internal administrator or it can be handed over to external service providers.
TRANSPARENCY ON SAP basis ROLES
If we look at the question of standardisation, this concerns not only the administrative side of IT products, but also the standardisation and simplification of IT products offered by the SAP basis. For this purpose, tools such as ITIL for standardised tasks and the development of IT product and IT service catalogues have already established themselves to the greatest extent possible. These clearly describe the IT services provided. In addition to the definition of the service to be provided, the clear description shall include the identification of disclaimers and conditions that must exist. Also part of the service description is a price that can be composed of fixed and variable parts. This simplification and bundling of the product portfolios should also reduce the administrative burden when ordering, activating, changing, terminating and, of course, invoicing. The description of the IT services and the associated development of an IT product catalogue is the basis for standardisation, whether the recipient is an external or internal customer (e.g. a business unit). One difficulty is the definition of IT products, i.e. the pooling of IT services and resources. An orientation towards the idea of cloud computing can help. The characteristics of cloud computing are the provision of standardised services in terms of performance and type of performance, results-orientated services, provision of performance to a wide range of service customers, scalability, transaction-based billing and high risk of IT service failure.
An important area of SAP Security is the analysis of the customer's own SAP programs, which are classically written in the proprietary SAP language ABAP. Here, too, as in all programming languages, security vulnerabilities can be programmed - whether consciously or unconsciously. However, the patterns of security vulnerabilities in ABAP code differ from those in Java stacks or Windows programs. The goal of these conventional programs is usually to either crash the program (buffer overflow) or to artificially execute the program's own code (code injection). Both is not possible in ABAP, since a crash of a process causes nothing else than the creation of an entry in the log database (Dump ST22) and a subsequent termination of the report with return to the menu starting point. So a direct manipulation as in other high level languages or servers is not possible. However, there are other manipulation possibilities.
"Shortcut for SAP Systems" simplifies tasks in the area of the SAP basis and complements missing functions of the standard.
Encryption of the data of a HANA system is disabled by default.
The website www.sap-corner.de offers many useful information about SAP basis.
Synchronisation of Repository Objects (SPAU): Developers must call the transaction SPAU and then match it.