As enterprises adopt cloud-native platforms like SAP Kyma to extend and innovate their SAP landscapes, ensuring robust security becomes paramount. SAP Kyma, built on Kubernetes and designed for extensibility and integration, incorporates multiple layers of security mechanisms tailored to protect applications, data, and communication within complex distributed environments.
This article provides an overview of the fundamental security concepts in SAP Kyma, helping developers, architects, and security professionals understand how Kyma safeguards applications and integrations within the SAP ecosystem.
Kyma enables building, deploying, and managing microservices, serverless functions, and extensions that interact with sensitive enterprise data and critical SAP backend systems. This distributed, cloud-native architecture introduces new attack surfaces and challenges:
Therefore, SAP Kyma integrates comprehensive security strategies to ensure confidentiality, integrity, availability, and compliance.
Authentication verifies the identity of users or services trying to access Kyma resources.
Authorization controls what authenticated users or services can do within Kyma.
Kyma integrates Istio as its service mesh, providing advanced security features for service-to-service communication:
APIs are a critical interface in Kyma, exposing business functions and data.
The Kyma API Gateway offers capabilities such as:
APIs can be exposed publicly or restricted within internal networks based on business requirements.
Managing sensitive data like credentials, certificates, and tokens is essential for secure operations.
Kyma supports Kubernetes Network Policies to restrict traffic flow between pods, namespaces, and external endpoints.
Continuous monitoring and auditing help detect and respond to security incidents.
Security in SAP Kyma is a multi-layered, integrated approach that protects users, services, and data throughout the application lifecycle. By combining Kubernetes-native security features with SAP-specific identity services, API management, and service mesh capabilities, Kyma ensures a robust defense posture for cloud-native SAP extensions.
For enterprises extending their SAP systems using Kyma, understanding and applying these security concepts is essential to safeguard business-critical applications and maintain compliance in today’s complex IT environments.