Is your organization fully covered with your current anti-virus solution?
You may think so, but if you are using SAP, you may not be as safe as you think.
Traditional anti-virus solutions do not protect SAP systems—so file uploads into SAP applications completely bypass all your defenses, potentially storing malware in the midst of your business-data crown jewels. For greater security, you need a solution designed to protect SAP.
Whether this is news to you or something you’ve known about for a while, the question’s the same: “What are our options?”
Fortunately, there are several solutions on the market, all with different strengths and areas of focus. Which one is the best choice for protecting your SAP system? Read on as we analyze three popular options. We’ll start first with our own: bowbridge Anti-Virus for SAP Solutions.
Option 1: bowbridge Anti-Virus for SAP Solutions
bowbridge is the only product on the market with a current NW-VSI 2.1 certification that specializes solely in SAP anti-virus.
Our focus on SAP security and anti-virus pushes us to provide the most up-to-date, effective SAP security solutions to keep your company’s SAP system is protected and running smoothly. This pinpoint focus is a great option for organizations looking for ultra-robust SAP protection, but they will need to use other anti-virus options for the rest of their systems: bowbridge specializes only in SAP.
Security you can trust. bowbridge is no newcomer to the market. We understand SAP front to back. The antivirus protection we provide is dependable and safe.
Filtering. We know there is no one-size-fits-all approach to security. Our solution helps you make adjustments through our extensive filtering options to deny or allow all types of data and files.
Forensics and quarantine capabilities. You know exactly what security threats attempted to access your SAP systems. Copies of all rejected data can be securely stored for reconstruction or analysis.
Performance. One factor that discourages many people from using effective protection is the performance impact it has on the work you do. Run scans with confidence knowing that bowbridge is the only commercial solution offering super-fast in-memory virus scanning.
Protected data transfer. For robust protection, an attack must be blocked before reaching SAP applications. bowbridge is designed to do this. File-transfers are scanned for malicious content before they are processed by your SAP applications.
Industry leader. bowbridge partners with McAfee, SOPHOS, and Kaspersky for full enterprise-class protection for your SAP systems. The respective malware detection engines are embedded in bowbridge Anti-Virus, giving you a complete solution.
Versatility. bowbridge Anti-Virus for SAP Solutions runs side-by-side with whatever anti-virus product you chose to secure the OS-layer. There are no dependencies or functional overlaps.
Ease of use. bowbridge is ready to go. No need to make any configurations on the operating system level. That doesn’t mean you can’t make changes, however: bowbridge is fully customizable, allowing you to create the protection that works best for your SAP.
Proven. bowbridge Anti-Virus is being used by leading corporations in virtually any vertical and geography. Want to talk to a bowbridge customer and hear from them first-hand? Contact us, we’ll arrange a call or web-meeting.
Option 2: Trend Micro™ Deep Security™
Trend Micro, a solid security company, provides many security products, such as e-mail security, endpoint anti-virus, and enterprise security management. This wide net is handy for people looking for one vendor to take care of everything, but it may not offer enough robustness for high-risk SAP systems.
A broad-based approach. Deep Security offers powerful server protection, is SAP certified (albeit only an older Deep Security Release and that only for the previous VSI 2.0 scenario) and has a wide range of security capabilities. It’s worth noting, however, that it is a broad-based server security solution that was later integrated with SAP NetWeaver, as opposed to a security solution designed specifically for SAP and its unique structure.
Less mixing and matching. While bowbridge allows you to use our SAP security product alongside any other OS-level solution, Trend Micro requires you to use their entire OS-level security system with Deep Security, their product. Some companies welcome this, as it saves time on analyzing individual vendors, while others prefer the flexibility to be able to select the individual solutions that work best for their needs.
Limited scanning. While bowbridge scans data in memory, Trend Micro scans only files. This means each file is written to a temporary file on the SAP server where it is scanned and if needed, deleted.
Option 3: ClamSAP
ClamSAP is an open-source project linking ClamAV to SAP’s Virus Scan Interface. ClamAV is an anti-virus solution which has drawn its fair share of adherents and detractors. It performs email and web scanning as well as endpoint security. It also has a simple tool that retrieves and deploys virus-definition database updates.
No support. The ClamSAP project is maintained by an individual expert. This lack of a team carries the risk of lack of support should that individual be unavailable—particularly as ClamSAP does not have any commercial support, relying instead on the user community and the project maintainer.
Distributed as source code. In most cases, customers will have to build ClamSAP from the source code (Suse Linux Enterprise Server is the only Linux distribution including a binary version). For admins not skilled in using C-development tools, this may pose a challenge—and most certainly will in a Windows environment.
Uses the ClamAV engine. ClamAV is a popular open-source virus scanner, with great appeal for individuals or organizations with tight budgets who want a bare-bones solution. However, reviews tend to agree that it simply isn’t in the same playing field as enterprise-level commercial products like McAfee, Sophos, or Kaspersky.
Ready to Decide on Your SAP Anti-Virus Solution?
Both Deep Security and ClamAV with ClamSAP provide solutions for scanning file transfers in SAP environments, but they suffer from a similar problem: Neither is focused primarily on SAP security.
Deep Security is an enterprise-grade server security solution with a “bolted-on” connector to SAP and which requires customers to go all in on Trend Micro’s security framework—for OS-level, Network level and Security Management.
ClamSAP is a non-commercial solution, completely lacking any professional support. Leveraging the free ClamAV for virus scanning is certainly better than nothing—but that should not be the metric for securing your most critical IT asset. In the end, you get what you pay for.
Both options somewhat address the problem at hand, but those solutions aren’t nearly as robust as what you find with bowbridge.
When your company runs on SAP, you need to do everything possible to neutralize security threats before they make their way into your SAP systems. If you are serious about cloud security and need to ensure your SAP application servers are protected, there’s only one clear choice. Go with the only SAP anti-virus solution built by the SAP professionals—bowbridge.
Get in touch with bowbridge to find out what we do to keep you safe.
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