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/

New Features and Functionality in SAP HANA

SAP HANA 2 is the business data platform for the intelligent enterprise. Leveraging state-of-the-art database and data management technology, advanced analytical capabilities and intuitive application development tools in the only all-in-one, in-memory-first data platform – SAP HANA 2 frees up valuable resources and human capital for new and innovative application development to meet your business’s strategic objectives.

SAP recently released 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.

Database enhancements 

• Advanced data and privacy protection including enhanced data anonymization with additional algorithms and configurable retention policies for the audit log. 
• Improvements for high availability/disaster recovery (HA/DR) will further increase system availability and help protect enterprise-critical applications with a new multi-target system replication option that now also supports multiple region-local A/A secondary, a further enhanced time travel option and a “Follow-the-sun” option that optimizes the latency for write transactions by rotating the primary system around the world. 
• SAP HANA now also offers a fast-restart option that is using TMPFS on OS Level to significantly reduce restart times with existing hardware. 
• The new Native Storage Extension allows tables, columns or partitions to be flagged as warm data, residing mainly on disk. Warm data is loaded to an in-memory buffer cache only as required for query processing. 

Data Management enhancements

• Support for federated access to high-availability Hadoop clusters, and a generic adapter framework for Smart Data Access. 
• Smart Data Integration now allows to group multiple agents, provides real-time support for Mainframe DB2 and integration into Web IDE. 
• To enhance the quality of your data SAP now provides geocoding support for India addresses and FIAS compliant address assignments in Russia.
• The Enterprise Architecture Designer now offers support for SAP Big Data Services and Hadoop Hive 2.0 data lakes as well as support for HANA versioned tables. 
• Calculation View modeling via Web IDE now allows to integrate data sources more easily, comes with improved user experience, enhanced support for parallelization and extended variable support for models.

Analytical Intelligence enhancements 

• Increase the execution performance and productivity for data scientists by providing API’s for Python and R as well as a new Gradient Boosting Tree algorithm. 
• New methods for linear referencing, hexagonal grid-based aggregation, labeling tools, new APIs with reduced memory footprint and Data Hub integration will allow you to gain the most insight from geocoding your business data. 
• Improved flexibility, debugging support, new functions and algorithms as well as extended GraphScript capabilities and openCypher support allow more complex analyses and scenarios for your connected data.

Application Development and Tool enhancements  

• View functions for both SQLScript and SQL, SQLScript Debugger and Code Analyzer enhancements and a unit test framework. 
• The Web IDE comes with improved editors, Python support, wizards and dialogs and now allows multiple workspaces and mass import of synonyms. 
• A pending deployment indicator helps developer to keep track of their deployment. 
• The XSA runtime now supports X.509 as well as SPNEGO authentication, supports tenant specific installations and support for symbolic links.
• The HANA Run Time Tools include an enhanced SQL console with session recovery, performance improvements and more flexibility. 
• The catalog browser now supports search across multiple schemas and comes with an improved user experience.

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Check out our new Whitepaper "What's new in SAP HANA?" to learn more about additional features and functionality found in the latest release of SAP HANA

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New Innovations in SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 04

SAP HANA 2 is the business data platform for the intelligent enterprise. Leveraging state-of-the-art database and data management technology, advanced analytical capabilities and intuitive application development tools in the only all-in-one, in-memory-first data platform – SAP HANA 2 frees up valuable resources and human capital for new and innovative application development to meet your business’s strategic objectives.

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.

Here are the latest innovations in SAP HANA from SAP.

• Data tiering enhancements for improved scale
• Persistent memory hardware availability
• Scale-out enhancements
• Data protection and privacy
• Smart data access and Hadoop integration
• Hexagon grid clustering for spatial data
• Data scientist and machine learning improvements
• Spatial performance enhancements and algorithms
• User experience optimizations throughout

Learn more about SAP HANA at: https://blogs.sap.com/2019/04/05/whats-new-in-sap-hana-2.0-sps-04-2/

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