Authorization tools - advantages and limitations
Check and refresh the permission buffer
In order to use the statistical usage data, you must first extend the default SAP value of the retention time to a reasonable period of time. For a representative period, a minimum of 14 months and a maximum of 24 months shall be sufficient. This includes day-to-day business, monthly financial statements, underyear activities such as inventory and annual financial statements. Now call the transaction ST03N and navigate to: Collector & Perf. Database > Performance Database > Workload Collector Database > Reorganisation > Control Panel.
The SAP authorization concept must generally be created in two versions: for the ABAP stack and for the Java stack. Which roles are required, which role may call which SAP functions, and other conceptual issues are identical. However, there are fundamental differences between the two versions.
Authorizations in SAP BW, HANA and BW/4HANA
Typically, users access a table's data through applications rather than directly. If so, you should take precautions and restrict access to sensitive data. End users typically do not access table-level data directly, but the data is displayed in business applications and their display is restricted in context by means of entitlement checks. However, there are cases where generic access to tables via the SE16, SE16N, SM30, SM31 or SM34 transaction is required for administrators, key users, verifiers, etc. For example, a verifier should have read access to all customising tables. However, you do not want to display security-related tables. Key users should be able to access certain reports regularly, but only read information relevant to their work. There are several ways to restrict access to tables by using table tools. This means that users can only access tables or table contents that they want to see. However, we would like to point out that the granting of permissions for these tools in the production environment is considered to be critical to security, since it is very easy to allow access to large amounts of sensitive data in the case of erroneous or excessive permissions. Therefore, only apply these permissions in a restricted way.
In addition, you can also define customised permission checks in the SOS and also define combinations of authorization objects and their values. You can create up to 1,000 custom permissions checks in the Check ID namespace 9000 to 9999. You can also redefine whitelists for these permission checks, which apply to either individual or all of the customer's permission checks. The configuration is described in SAP Note 837490.
Secure your go-live additionally with "Shortcut for SAP systems". You can assign necessary SAP authorizations quickly and easily directly in the system.
SAP OSS Note 101146 provides a good overview here.
On the other hand, you can implement medium (3) and low (4) security advisories via support packages, which you should also include regularly.