How To Take Care Of Erp Data Security When Moving To The Cloud

By Author: appsian
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ERP systems have much vulnerability that makes them prone to cyberattacks. This is precisely why there is so much discussion these days relating to data privacy and ERP data security. This is particularly true for companies migrating from on-premises to cloud-based ERP systems.

ERP Data Security: Important Issues

It is observed that individual companies are migrating their ERP systems either to web hyper-scalers (AWS, for example), or vendor-specific clouds, or hosting providers. But the security departments are concerned with ERP security aspects as in who has access to their data once their systems have migrated. When ERP moves to the cloud, most development instances usually have a complete copy of production with all sensitive data as the production has. Many of these organizations are trying to change this.

Shifting to the Cloud: Concern Areas

In most of the instances, the cloud vendor runs all hardware and software. It also administers all applications. So, it has access to all data of its clients. This is a precarious situation relating to data privacy and data security.

Some ...
... organizations are very apprehensive about switching to the cloud because of specific worries about ERP data security. They don't want all private, confidential data in an environment they do not have complete control over. So we're witnessing a shift to data controls, whether it'sMulti Factor Authentication (MFA) or data masking, particularly for those accounts that are based on who can access what kind of data or whether it's private personal data. Layering in of many of those controls, particularly in the development stack, is being observed to have better control over ERP security.

Sometimes the ERP systems are mission-critical, and you have to think about recovery from disasters and what happens if the network gets disconnected or destroyed. If you are on-site, you will always have access to all those devices. But if it is in the cloud, you can't get there. It implies a significant data security risk.

ERP systems pose significant challenges as it is generally not easy to define them and determine who has access to what information. Many ERPs are now designed to where they are metadata-driven apps, and you need to understand the metadata to truly understand what a user accesses. It's more challenging to grasp what people are doing because of ERPs' complex nature, whether it's PeopleSoft or SAP.

Measures to Ensure ERP Data Security

Within the ERP framework, it needs to be context-based security. If you think about how you use your software or depending on how you access the program, you must have data that is either masked or multi-factor authentication needs to be stepped up. Also, you can monitor access to that specific transaction depending on where the user is located. These are precise, contextual attribute-based controls integrated into the application and give back control to the organization. Most of these internet-enabled ERP applications are just authenticated with user IDs and passwords, and they're highly vulnerable if a hacker has those credentials.

That's why phishing attacks are successful as they access the system and all the roles and transactions that the user has access to. This is where you want the least-privileged access to be implemented when they come from an untrusted location. That's where you come through additional defense layers and decide what someone really will be able to do, see or edit through specific attributes.

Appsian One of the leading ERP data security,compliance,implementation solutions provider that gives organizations to complete control and visibility over their ERP data.