Pathlock Platform

Organizations rely on Line of Business (LoB) applications for core operations across finance, supplier management, CRM, and HR. Although SAP remains dominant, most enterprises operate heterogeneous environments that combine SAP with other large suites, specialist products, and rapidly growing SaaS services. SaaS adoption and SAP’s own acquisition of SaaS products—often with architectures and security models different from SAP ECC and S/4HANA—are reshaping access control and governance requirements. Because LoB applications underpin critical processes and regulated data, organizations need strong capabilities for access management, Segregation of Duties (SoD) enforcement, and emergency access control.

The challenge is balancing depth (understanding complex entitlement models such as SAP business roles, single roles, authorization objects, transactions, and Fiori entitlements) with breadth (covering many LoB and adjacent services like file storage and office suites). SoD analysis must work within single applications and across end-to-end, cross-application processes, while enabling maintainable rulesets that can adapt to business change and harmonize configuration differences across instances. This drives convergence between SAP-focused access control/GRC and broader IGA, since lifecycle management, provisioning, and governance increasingly span mixed application portfolios.

Pathlock—originating as Greenlight Technologies and expanded via acquisitions of Appsian, Security Weaver, CSI Tools, and SAST Solutions (2022)—offers a SaaS-based Pathlock Platform (and separate on-premises offerings) focused on protecting business applications, data, and processes. The platform supports 140+ applications, provides unified connectors, a consistent UI, a risk dashboard with KRIs and historical comparisons, and 90+ out-of-the-box reports. Core capabilities include fine-grained cross-system SoD, provisioning with simulation and mitigations, continuous entitlement usage monitoring (“can do”), transaction monitoring (“did do”), role analytics, emergency access management, recertification automation, workflows, and controls libraries/playbooks aligned to major compliance frameworks. Strengths center on breadth across LoB apps and cross-system analytics; current challenges include only baseline process controls (mainly financial) and SaaS fit constraints for some customers.

• LoB applications support operational processes across finance, supplier management, CRM, and HR.
• Most organizations do not operate a single-vendor LoB environment despite SAP’s dominant market role.
• SaaS adoption is driving more organizations toward multi-vendor strategies for LoB SaaS services.
• SAP has acquired SaaS services with architectures and security models that differ from SAP ECC and S/4HANA.
• Segregation of Duties, access governance, and emergency access controls are essential for protecting core business processes.
• SAP entitlement concepts include business roles, single roles, authorization objects, transactions, and newer Fiori-specific entitlements.
• Pathlock acquired Appsian, Security Weaver, CSI Tools, and SAST Solutions in 2022.
• Pathlock has more than 500 employees and more than 1,400 active customers.
• The Pathlock Platform supports more than 140 business applications across on-premises and cloud environments.
• The platform provides more than 90 out-of-the-box reports aimed at common audit requirements and regulations.

• “Only when both the depth of application controls and the breadth of application coverage are adequately managed can key capabilities such as role design, access analysis and certification, risk management, or user provisioning be implemented efficiently in an organization.”
• “SoD rules must be able to not only identify SoD violations within a LoB application, but also for cross-application processes.”
• “An integrated approach is required that goes well-beyond SAP and takes a broader perspective.”
• “Pathlock focuses on delivering a 360-degree platform for protecting critical business applications, data, and processes.”
• “The Pathlock Platform supports more than 140 business applications on-premises and in the cloud.”
• “The open connector framework provided by Pathlock can be extended for supporting further additional applications such as home-grown solutions, additional COTS systems, and others.”
• “The connectors also support offline analysis, not affecting the runtime performance of LoB applications.”
• “A central element of the Pathlock platform is the risk dashboard, providing a unified view on risks across all managed applications.”
• “The risks are described in business-centric language and focus on conflicts or critical risks for specific groups of activities.”
• “Pathlock’s simulation engine supports risk assessments for both roles and users prior to provisioning.”