New security and privacy features in SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 04

SAP recently announced the release of SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 04. SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 04 includes a mix of new and continuous innovations across the themes of database management, data management, analytical intelligence and application development.

The new SPS 04 release of SAP HANA 2.0 provides important security and privacy enhancements addressing these challenges:

• Data anonymization KPIs increase transparency for decision makers when assessing anonymization scenarios, easy-to-understand new controls simplify the setup of anonymization views, and l-diversity enhances the k-anonymity method
• Audit retention policies let you specify a retention period after which audit log entries are automatically deleted
• Simplified authorization troubleshooting gets SAP HANA users up and running again quickly and with less administrative overhead

Data anonymization extensions
SAP HANA data anonymization, which was introduced with SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 03, allows you to get analytical insights from data while protecting the privacy of individuals.

With the new release, SAP HANA introduces anonymization KPIs that help decision makers to assess critical variables for risk and utility. This makes it easier to achieve the right balance between the goals of protecting data privacy while ensuring that the anonymized data remains useful.

Real-time data anonymization was released with two anonymization methods: differential privacy and k-anonymity. Now l-diversity has been added, which is an extension to k-anonymity and provides additional protection for data sets with homogeneous sensitive attributes.

The setup of k-anonymity has also been simplified with the automation of generating hierarchies for generalizing quasi-identifying attributes, and data scientist can now control additional parameters when setting up anonymization views.

And finally, SQL views are now supported for data anonymization – previously only calculation views were available.

Audit retention policies
Fine-tuned retention management is an important building block for compliance. You can now specify a retention period after which audit log entries of individual audit policies will be automatically deleted.

But compliance requirements are not the only reason why you might want to delete audit log entries: you can of course also use this new functionality to free up database space, delete audit log entries that simply are no longer needed.

Simplified authorization troubleshooting
Authorization is a cornerstone of controlled access in SAP HANA. Defining authorization concepts requires careful thought and consideration. If authorization errors occur in either the test or productive landscape, they need to be quickly resolved so that users can access the database objects they require. The new authorization troubleshooting features introduced in SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 04 aim to simplify troubleshooting by adding two new techniques.

Learn more at: https://blogs.sap.com/2019/04/08/address-business-challenges-in-security-and-privacy-with-sap-hana-2.0-sps-04/