By Enterprise Security & Architecture Desk
Published: October 2023

Main Facts: The Double-Whammy Facing Enterprise IT Leaders

Enterprise IT and cybersecurity leadership teams are facing an unprecedented convergence of foundational architectural overhauls. SAP has officially drawn a hard line in the sand regarding the lifecycle of SAP Identity Management (IDM): mainstream maintenance is scheduled to terminate permanently on December 31, 2027. While extended maintenance will be available until 2030, it comes at a steep, added financial cost. Most critically, SAP has confirmed that there is no direct successor product being developed as a like-for-like replacement.

Compounding this looming crisis, organizations running legacy SAP environments are simultaneously being nudged—or outright forced—to migrate to RISE with SAP, fundamentally altering their core enterprise resource planning (ERP) architecture, infrastructure hosting models, and underlying integration patterns.

For CIOs, CISOs, and SAP project directors, this creates a high-stakes operational collision. Two of the most complex, resource-intensive transformations an enterprise can undergo—replacing central identity governance and migrating the core ERP landscape to a managed cloud model—are landing on the exact same project roadmaps.

Treating identity governance as an afterthought or a minor footnote to the broader RISE migration timeline is a catastrophic error. SAP’s native Cloud Identity portfolio, while powerful in its own right, is explicitly not designed to act as a comprehensive, like-for-like replacement for SAP IDM. It lacks the capacity to serve as a centralized, enterprise-wide identity and access governance (IAG) system spanning both complex SAP environments and heterogeneous non-SAP, SaaS, and hybrid cloud infrastructures.

Consequently, organizations must immediately decouple identity governance from the general IT backlog, establishing it as a dedicated, parallel workstream complete with distinct milestones, specialized resource allocation, and a robust risk mitigation strategy.

Chronology: Understanding the Timelines and Strategic Milestones

Navigating this dual transition requires a granular understanding of the operational milestones leading up to the 2027 deadline. Because enterprise architectures cannot be overhauled overnight, organizations must map their transformation journeys across a multi-year horizon.

Phase 1: The Discovery and Mapping Window (Present – Q4 2024)

Before any technical migrations can begin, organizations must conduct an exhaustive, bottom-up discovery process. Years of organic growth, urgent patches, and undocumented custom configurations mean that legacy SAP IDM instances are typically riddled with orphaned entitlements, shadow provisioning rules, and custom connectors. Relying on quick inventory passes during this phase guarantees downstream failures.

Phase 2: Architecture Design and Sequencing (2025 – 2026)

During this window, enterprise architects must select their migration sequence, aligning the retirement of SAP IDM with the broader RISE with SAP go-live schedule. Teams must choose one of three distinct migration pathways:

1. Retire SAP IDM Before the RISE Cutover: Establishing a clean, modern Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) foundation prior to the ERP migration.
2. Run Both in Parallel: Managing interdependent transformations simultaneously, balancing shared stakeholders and overlapping risk windows.
3. Retire SAP IDM After the RISE Cutover: Designing the new IGA platform around the target RISE architecture from day one, while pushing legacy SAP IDM past its comfort zone during the ERP transition.

Phase 3: Mainstream Maintenance Sunset (December 31, 2027)

The hard deadline set by SAP. Organizations failing to transition off SAP IDM by this date will either operate unsupported identity infrastructure or be forced into expensive, short-term extended maintenance agreements while scrambling to finish their modernizations.

Phase 4: Extended Maintenance and Final Cutoff (2028 – 2030)

The absolute final window for organizations utilizing extended support. By 2030, all legacy SAP IDM instances must be fully decommissioned, replaced by third-party IGA solutions capable of managing modern SAP and non-SAP hybrid architectures.

Supporting Data: The Hidden Costs of Poor Planning

The risks associated with mismanaged identity transitions during an ERP overhaul are not merely theoretical; they carry severe operational, financial, and compliance penalties. Historical data from major enterprise system integrations highlights several recurring pitfalls:

• Audit and Compliance Failures: According to enterprise IT governance surveys, over 40% of organizations migrating to cloud-managed ERP models experience compliance citations due to unverified user provisioning or broken segregation-of-duties (SoD) controls during the cutover window.
• Productivity Loss via User Lockouts: In rushed SAP IDM migrations, poorly mapped role provisioning workflows routinely result in legitimate business users being locked out of mission-critical systems upon go-live. Industry estimates suggest that unexpected system downtime costs large enterprises an average of $5,600 per minute.
• The Cost of Double-Rebuilding: Organizations that opt to swap SAP IDM for a temporary stopgap tool just to survive the RISE cutover end up spending 35% to 50% more over a five-year lifecycle compared to those that implement a permanent, enterprise-grade IGA solution from the outset.
• The Non-SAP Factor: Enterprises rarely run on SAP alone. Studies show that the average large enterprise utilizes over 1,000 SaaS applications alongside its core ERP. A governance tool restricted solely to SAP environments leaves massive security blind spots across the broader digital ecosystem.

Official Responses and Strategic Perspectives: What Changes Under RISE?

To understand why a simple "lift-and-shift" identity migration fails, organizations must examine how RISE with SAP fundamentally alters the division of labor between the enterprise and SAP as a managed service provider (MSP).

The Shift in Infrastructure Ownership

In a traditional on-premise or customer-managed cloud environment, the enterprise owns the entire stack. Infrastructure, Basis administration (the technical middleware layer keeping SAP operational), and identity governance sit under a single organizational roof.

Under RISE with SAP, infrastructure management and Basis administration are handed over to SAP. While this relieves internal IT teams of routine hardware maintenance, it radically alters identity and security workflows:

• Emergency Access Procedures: Traditional "firefighter" or emergency access models that assumed direct system-level backend access must now be entirely redesigned to route through SAP’s strict managed operations framework.
• Segregation-of-Duties (SoD): Legacy SoD matrices, which were previously validated exclusively against internal IT staff, must now account for SAP’s operational personnel as entities possessing system-level privileges.
• Change Management Integration: Role provisioning workflows that relied on internal teams making direct modifications to backend systems must pivot to align with SAP’s standardized change-management protocols.

Industry experts emphasize that these operational shifts do not happen automatically simply because RISE promises a "managed" experience. Without deliberate planning, organizations discover these friction points only after go-live—manifesting as broken provisioning pipelines, unmanaged entitlements, and unexpected audit findings.

Implications: Charting a Safe Path Forward

The convergence of the SAP IDM sunset and the migration to RISE with SAP presents a clear fork in the road for enterprise leadership.

The Pitfalls of a Direct "Swap" Mindset

Organizations that treat SAP IDM retirement as a straightforward drop-in replacement—where old processes are unceremoniously copied into a new tool—invariably hit a brick wall. When provisioning breaks, entitlements become orphaned, and access controls fail, the business pays the price through operational outages, security vulnerabilities, and compliance penalties.

The Strategic Opportunity

Conversely, forward-thinking organizations are treating the retirement of SAP IDM not as a forced burden, but as a golden opportunity. By partnering with established IGA vendors equipped with certified SAP connectors—such as One Identity—enterprises can implement comprehensive governance solutions that span on-premise, hybrid, and SaaS environments.

Such platforms offer the breadth required to manage cross-system segregation of duties, integrate smoothly with SAP’s managed operations under RISE, and future-proof enterprise security for the next decade.

Final Verdict: Proactivity vs. Reactive Crisis Management

The choice facing enterprise leaders is binary. Organizations can map and sequence their identity governance migration deliberately, taking control of the timeline and aligning it with their broader business goals. Alternatively, they can ignore the warnings, delay the hard choices, and allow identity gaps to expose themselves painfully during a high-stakes audit or a crippling operational outage.

As the December 31, 2027 deadline rapidly approaches, one reality remains indisputable: a well-planned migration tailored to your RISE timeline takes significantly longer to execute correctly than it does to postpone. The time for strategic action is now.