Basel-II News

WALLDORF, Germany, Sept. 5 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Drawing on the proven, best-in-class implementation expertise of its governance, risk and compliance (GRC) customers and partners, SAP AG today announced the availability of a new SAP(R) Best Practices offering in support of SAP(R) GRC Access Control, a market-leading application for monitoring and enforcing user access and authorization controls. Leveraging the key learnings and proven implementation know-how of SAP GRC customers and partners across multiple industries and geographies, this new SAP Best Practices offering provides SAP GRC Access Control customers with common out-of-the-box business processes and scenarios, pre-configuration settings, and support, methodologies and documentation to help accelerate their compliance solution implementations while reducing risk and controlling costs.

SAP Best Practices offerings enable customers to benefit from the company's 35-plus years of industry leadership in business applications. SAP customers around the world use SAP Best Practices to fast-track solution implementations, improve operational excellence and accelerate return on investment. This new SAP Best Practices offering has been specifically designed for SAP GRC Access Control, a key component of SAP(R) solutions for governance, risk and compliance (SAP solutions for GRC). SAP GRC Access Control helps prevent fraud and misuse of information and helps maintain compliance with international financial reporting and risk management regulatory mandates. The SAP Best Practices offering for SAP GRC Access Control is immediately available to SAP customers as a free download at http://help.sap.com/bp_grcv152/GRC_US/HTML/index.htm

SAP GRC Access Control provides a comprehensive, cross-enterprise set of preventive and detective access controls that enables all corporate compliance stakeholders - including business managers, auditors and IT security managers - to collaboratively define and oversee proper segregation of duties (SoD) enforcement, one of the key controls for regulatory compliance and data privacy. The access control application from SAP addresses critical customer requirements for risk analysis and remediation, enterprise role management, compliant user provisioning and superuser access management. Hundreds of companies worldwide use SAP GRC Access Control to help them manage their compliance process for access and authorization control and remain compliant with an increasing number of regulatory mandates.

SAP Extends Position as Compliance Market Leader

Leading companies around the world are increasingly turning to SAP to help them meet their compliance needs. In the past year, the number of new SAP GRC Access Control customers has more than doubled, with particular strength seen in the consumer products, high tech, chemicals, oil and gas, life sciences, and utilities industries. SAP GRC Access Control is available and being used by leading organizations in all major geographic regions.

"Due to the increasing complexity of regulations and the damage that non- compliance can cause companies, we continue to see a sharp rise in demand for our GRC solutions, with SAP GRC Access Control being one of the most requested solutions within the SAP GRC portfolio," said Narina Sippy, senior vice president and general manager, Governance, Risk and Compliance Business Unit, SAP AG. "True to our mission to provide best-of-class solutions for GRC by combining business-critical applications with deep industry expertise, we've added the new SAP Best Practices offering for SAP GRC Access Control to further enhance our offering and safeguard our customers' success."

SAP GRC Access Control has been evaluated in recent months by leading industry analyst firms. In February 2007, Gartner rated SAP as a "Strong Positive," the firm's highest rating possible, in its "MarketScope for Segregation of Duties Within ERP, 2007" report.(1) In Forrester Research's "Segregation of Duties: A Building Block for Enterprise IT Controls" report, issued in March 2007, the independent analyst firm evaluated eight application controls monitoring and automation vendors for their ability to meet four critical criteria, with SAP successfully meeting all requirements and lauded for its "strength in access controls and SoD for the SAP environment."(2)

About SAP Solutions for GRC

SAP solutions for governance, risk and compliance (SAP solutions for GRC) promote business viability by unifying corporate strategy, control initiatives, opportunity discovery and loss mitigation across the extended enterprise. A unified approach to GRC overcomes the challenges of driving corporate strategy, regulatory compliance and risk management across disconnected systems, regions and functions, creating increased business performance and competitive advantage. SAP solutions for GRC processes are enabled across SAP and non-SAP systems, working together with GRC ecosystem partner content, technology and applications to provide the most effective solution for governance, risk and compliance available today. Currently more than 2,200 companies worldwide use SAP solutions for GRC. For more information about SAP solutions for GRC, please visit http://www.sap.com/grc.