Ted Wagner joined SAP National Security Services in 2015, tasked with the security and compliance of the corporate network, sharing best practice with customers and security oversight of NS2’s FedRAMP and commercial cloud offerings. Today, he’s the organization’s vice president and chief information security officer.
In 2019, SAP NS2 spent a significant amount of time transitioning from a single-product focused Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program environment to a FedRAMP NS2 secure cloud platform. It added a payroll management system to SAP SuccessFactors and gained authorization for SAP Analytic Cloud, which allows SAP to normalize and standardize the way it applies security controls across a growing number of SAP and non-SAP software products.
“By certifying our secure management plane, we can ensure that we patch, monitor and audit everything we do across a variety of single and multitenant software solutions running across a variety of infrastructure providers like AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform,” Wagner said.
This represents a maturation of SAP’s view of managing cloud software at scale across platforms in a more consistent way.
“We achieve this through extensive automation in our cloud operations,” Wagner added. In fact, SAP automates everything it does, including security controls auditing, patching and ongoing monitoring so it can easier adjust to evolving security threats.
Another significant achievement under Wagner’s leadership was receiving the 2019 James S. Cogswell Outstanding Industrial Security Achievement award from the Defense Department’s Defense Security Service.
In 2020, SAP is focused on making security and compliance more accessible, and delivering the Secure Intelligent Enterprise to new customers and new sectors in regulated industries such as oil and gas.
“We are focusing on customers and partners who are migrating software to a cloud environment and want to ensure they maintain compliance with NIST, FedRAMP, DOD and other regulated standards for cloud computing,” Wagner said. “This will allow us to share the years of knowledge we have acquired and thousands of hours of development to extend the Secure NS2 Cloud capabilities to our customers’ private cloud environments.”
Also this year, SAP started development of a cloud security poster management product it plans to offer to customers later this year.
Why Watch:
As a technology company, SAP is uniquely positioned to help the community, customers and employees navigate a rapidly changing world.
“Some of the software and services we are known for are now more important than ever, as they empower people to learn, share and communicate,” Wagner said. “We have focused much of the early part of 2020 on exercising and evolving our contingency plan to operate in a world where we need to ensure the security of our cloud operations, while maintaining a workforce that has transitioned to working remotely.”
On the customer side, SAP’s focus remains on security automation, compliance standards expansion, international expansion and constantly evolving its security posture to meet the always-evolving threat landscape.