You passed the audit. But did you actually reduce risk?
By Cyril Hauppert & Mark Stanley
“A clean audit doesn’t mean you’re secure. It just means you were good at giving auditors what they needed.”
— Mark Stanley, SAP Security Consultant, Pumpkin Consulting
The problem with passing
For most SAP teams, audit season ends with relief. You made it. No major findings. Maybe a few minor points to clean up.
But as CISOs and SAP security leaders, we have to ask the harder question:
Did we actually reduce risk—or did we just satisfy the audit?
We’ve worked with organizations that have passed audits for five years running. But when we run a real access review, we consistently uncover:
- Critical access retained by dormant or offboarded users
- Mitigated risks with no owner or expiration
- Rulesets that no longer reflect how the business operates
- Evidence gaps auditors never asked about—but regulators might
Why this happens
There are three reasons audit success doesn’t always equal security maturity:
1. Audits have limited scope
Auditors test samples, not systems. Their focus is validation, not improvement. If your evidence package is clean and the right boxes are checked, you pass—even if fundamental weaknesses exist underneath.
2. Teams learn to work the process
Security teams know what auditors want:
- Access reviews signed off
- Role owners looped in
- Mitigations documented
- SoD violations addressed
But too often, these are treated as one-time activities—not ongoing controls. Documents get prepared for the audit—not maintained during operations.
3. There’s no system of record for “what’s changed”
This is the critical blind spot. Auditors may only review what’s current—or what you can show them. Without historical access snapshots or simulation capability, there’s no way to assess what changed, why, or whether it actually improved your security posture.
A concrete example
We worked with a client that passed a SOX audit with no findings. On paper, everything looked great. But when we ran a snapshot analysis using Access Informer, here’s what we uncovered:
- 17 users retained highly sensitive access for over 8 months
- Over 100 mitigated risks had no assigned owner
- A recently divested business unit still had extended access under an outdated TSA
- One “read-only” role included change authority on a finance-critical object
None of this had shown up during the audit.
Why? Because the audit process looked at documented policies, current access samples, and formal approval flows—not operational reality.
The impact of incomplete remediation
Passing without remediation creates two risks:
- False Confidence
Executives and boards see a clean audit and assume everything’s fine. This leads to complacency, which erodes your ability to secure funding, escalate issues, or justify investments. - Compounded Risk Exposure
If weak controls are left unaddressed, they don’t stay neutral—they get worse. As access grows, roles evolve, and rules become outdated, your risk posture drifts further from reality.
“What you don’t fix compounds. And what you don’t know gets exposed eventually—either by the next audit, or by something worse.”
— Cyril Hauppert
What real risk reduction looks like
So what does actual progress look like—beyond audit success?
We recommend focusing on four key signals:
1. Snapshot-Based Access Reviews
Point-in-time captures let you compare the current state to the last audit baseline. You can track what changed, what was added, and whether risk went up or down.
2. Criticality-Based Rule Prioritization
You don’t need to resolve every violation. But you do need to resolve the right ones. Flagging and addressing high-risk combinations is where progress begins.
3. Active Exception Governance
Every exception should have a business justification, a control owner, and an expiration date. If not, you’re not mitigating—you’re just accepting the risk.
4. Change Simulation
When roles or access paths change, simulate the impact before transport. This prevents new risks from being introduced unintentionally during upgrades, reorganizations, or onboarding.
Take control of the narrative
Here’s the real value: when you go beyond audit prep and into risk-informed security, you take control of the narrative.
You’re not at the mercy of what the auditor happens to ask. You’re proactively showing:
- What you’ve fixed
- What’s improved
- What remains—and why
And that earns trust. With your board. With your auditors. And with your team.
Let’s build real risk reduction
Access Informer gives SAP security teams the visibility, analytics, and simulation tools to move from reactive compliance to proactive improvement.
- Role and user access snapshots
- SoD violation simulations
- Historical deltas
- Exception governance reports
- Audit-ready evidence, generated in hours
If you’re ready to go beyond the audit, we can help you do it—in just 8 days.
