SAP : Announcing General Availability of SAP Data Custodian for Microsoft Azure

For more than two decades, SAP and Microsoft have been collaborating to better serve our joint customers. Enterprise companies continue to choose SAP and Microsoft for the way our partnership empowers them to run excellent business applications and drive innovation.

As companies embark on their cloud journey, they are asking for more insight and control toward their mission-critical and sensitive data in the cloud. In a world where data governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) are highly important, customers have asked SAP and Microsoft to help them address these concerns.

Hence, our two companies decided to expand the partnership. Back in September 2018, we announced our intent to make software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering SAP Data Custodian available on Microsoft Azure for SAP customers.

Today, we are proud to announce general availability of SAP Data Custodian to support Microsoft Azure. With this joint initiative, SAP and Microsoft have gone an extra mile to offer unprecedented levels of data governance and compliance for our common customers. We are also excited to announce that Microsoft has signed up to be a beta customer of SAP Data Custodian for SAP SuccessFactors on Microsoft Azure.

SAP is a market leader in GRC, with an excellent track record of protecting customer data. Microsoft is a leader in protecting customer data in the cloud and offers an extensive range of security and compliance tools. SAP Data Custodian offers a best-in-class solution for customers in data compliance and protection by combining deep GRC expertise from SAP with built-in powerful security and compliance control features in Microsoft Azure.

SAP Data Custodian: Cloud Data Compliance and Protection Across the Entire Stack

Our customers must consider various data protection regulations in many different regions and countries, including Europe, Saudi Arabia, Australia, Singapore, the U.S., and more. Many of these regulations require special categories of our customers' cloud data to be localized in terms of data placement and access.

SAP Data Custodian support for Microsoft Azure comes with new features addressing complex data compliance and control requirements. We put emphasis on providing new, powerful data placement controls, enabling our customers to flexibly restrict their data or a certain category of data in a single country or specific regions to meet their data sovereignty requirements.

Furthermore, through the new access control features, our customers can define data access policies restricting access to their data from certain countries or regions based on data regulation requirements or business operations.

In addition to the improved access control, the full-stack coverage not only provides these new features for the underlying cloud infrastructure services but can be extended to SAP applications running on top of cloud infrastructure services. Now, our coverage expands to database-centric capabilities for SAP HANA and application-focused capabilities for SAP S/4HANA. Our customers benefit from simplification of data protection, making SAP Data Custodian an end-to-end data compliance and protection solution.

Building on our promise to provide unprecedented capabilities for data compliance and protection with SAP Data Custodian, we are working on new features for the future, including built-in policy templates for various statutory regulations, such as General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), China Cybersecurity law (CCSL), Cloud Computing Regulatory Framework (CCRF), and the like; context-based application access control and data masking; and a cloud-agnostic bring your own key (BYOK) key management service, allowing customers to gain full control of their data.

How to Learn More

We will be demonstrating SAP Data Custodian at SAPPHIRE NOW this week. If you are planning to attend, please visit our booth in the Platform and Intelligent Technologies area (90724) for detailed demos. We will also offer a session on SAP Data Custodian at Microsoft booth #729 at 3:30 p.m. ET on Tuesday, May 7.

Read more from Microsoft and watch this video:

For more information, visit the SAP Data Custodian area of sap.com, or contact us via email at [e-mail].

Thomas Saueressig is president of Product Engineering at SAP SE.
Thomas Lee is global vice president of GCS Multicloud at SAP SE.