INNOVATING TO SECURE THE WORLD’S LARGEST PRIVATE CLOUD

WRITTEN BY: MARCUS LAW

PRODUCED BY: KRISTOFER PALMER

he use of the cloud has truly taken off in recent years, but as cloud computing increases, so too do security threats. For companies such as SAP, which operates a private cloud, protecting the data of their customers is absolutely critical.

Roland Costea, the Global Chief Security Officer for SAP’s Enterprise Cloud Services, is responsible for running the Global Cybersecurity Program and Strategy for SAP’s Private Cloud.

“SAP is the coolest software company that your friends have never heard of,” he explains. “It puts a phone in every pocket but it's not Apple or Samsung, it puts shoes on the feet of the world, but it's not Nike or Adidas, it gives the world wings, but it's not Red Bull or Boeing.”

SAP’s Enterprise Cloud Services portfolio empowers customers to run a modern, intelligent ERP system in the cloud, enabling them to become cost-effective and sustainable intelligent enterprises.

One aspect of this portfolio is RISE with SAP, a business transformation-as-a-service platform that enables every company to become an intelligent and sustainable enterprise. “This is practically the vehicle to deliver SAP's Intelligent Enterprise Vision,” Costea adds. “It brings together the solutions and services you need, in one package, regardless of where your business stands now or where you want it to go.”

RISE with SAP enables businesses on their transformation journey needs for true business transformation is simplicity,” describes Costea. “That means having only one company which is responsible for service-level agreements, operations and issue handling. That comes with the benefit of best-of-breed cloud infrastructure providing a native cloud landscape powered by SAP and our hyperscaler partners.” is with them on each step of their road to an intelligent enterprise, migrating from the

Launched in January 2021, RISE with SAP helps companies seize the advantages of cloud computing in their mission-critical, core systems.

Roland Costea

TITLE: GLOBAL CISO - ENTERPRISE CLOUD SERVICES

LOCATION: GERMANY

Roland Costea is a Security Executive and the CISO for SAP Enterprise Cloud Services. He is a high performing security business leader who plays a key role in driving the digital transformation of SAP’s customers into a secured intelligent enterprise using the private cloud. Throughout his career of almost 20 years, Roland lead to success different security business units in companies like Microsoft, IBM, Cognizant or Genpact and he secured and developed the first private cloud in Romania in 2010 when few people were actually talking about cloud.

Wherever your data comes from, wherever it needs to go, Cribl gives you the freedom and flexibility to make choices instead of compromises. You can collect, reduce, enrich, normalise, and route data from any source to any destination to best support your business goals, with Cribl.

How Cribl Is Unlocking The Value Of All Observability Data

With its platform enabling more choice and control over telemetry data, Cribl is helping SAP Enterprise Cloud Services accelerate its security initiatives

Cribl is on a mission to unlock the value of all observability data so that organisations can provide optimal and secure experiences for their customers.

As Ledion Bitincka, Cribl’s Co-founder and CTO explains, the main problems Cribl addresses in the market originate from an explosion in observability data. “According to Gartner, the amount of data is growing roughly by 25% every year, meaning that in about five years, organisations will have two-and-a-half times the amount of data that they’re dealing with today.”

Cribl’s flagship product in the market, Cribl Stream, is a vendor-agnostic observability pipeline. “It allows organisations to collect and gather this observability, security, and telemetry data and route it at scale in the best format to wherever it makes sense, for alerting, analysis or compliance purposes,” Bitincka says.

Roland Costea, the Global Chief Security Officer for SAP’s Enterprise Cloud Services is responsible for running the organisation’s overall global cybersecurity programme. “One thing that represents our overall cybersecurity strategy is speed: accelerating our end-to-end security processes and services,” he explains. “We also need control and visibility into our own datasets, so that we are able to make intelligent decisions. What excites me most about Cribl’s platform is that it gives us the control, the flexibility, and the power of observability into our own data flows.”

SAP is helping organisations modernise their business processes and become intelligent enterprises. “We are helping our customers to protect their core SAP workloads,” Costea adds. “With Cribl, we are able to spend less time on repetitive processes that can be automated, so that we can free up more time for innovation. When we innovate, we can better deliver on our customer needs, build better solutions, better partnerships, and be there every step of the way to help our customers achieve their goals.”

For more information visit cribl.io

That makes them more resilient, profitable, and sustainable by adopting best practice processes and industry next-generation practices.”

With SAP’s Enterprise Cloud Services continually growing, when it comes to securing the RISE with SAP platform innovation is essential.

“Enterprise Cloud Services growth has been impressive in the last two years, and we look forward to continued growth,” Costea comments. As a result, this growth means onboarding top customers from all industries with the strongest security requirements.

“With that in mind,” he adds, “we need to innovate in the automation space in order to become more efficient and faster in processing big amounts of data, in creating detections, in tuning them, in making sure all the security controls are enforced at the deployment level and at the same time offering the visibility and transparency all these customers need.”

Securing RISE with SAP

When it comes to securing RISE with SAP, Security Engineering, Detection, Monitoring and SOAR each play a key role. SAP’s Security Information and Event Management system is the core of the organisation’s Security Operation Centre, with Costea’s team working with one of the top software security providers to create the platform for SAP’s cloud. “In addition, SOAR components are integrated with our SIEM in order to support our security operations in the most efficient way,” he adds. “But that still is not enough.”

Central to Costea’s approach to security is speed. From that perspective, his team faced five main challenges.

“First,” he explains, “we needed the ability to easily manage data normalisation and enrichment to ensure the security triage