SAP solutions for three lines of defense

Integrated, automated, risk-aware governance driving organizational resilience.
Screenshot of a dashboard in SAP Risk Management

What are SAP solutions for three lines of defense?

SAP solutions for three lines of defense are a bundle of offerings that standardize and automate enterprise risk, regulatory compliance, and auditing across operational management, risk management and compliance, and internal audit.

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Shift to remote, continuous, and risk-adjusted management that drives down risk and compliance costs and builds trust.

  • Automate key control and risk management activities.

  • Faciliatate audit engagement and improve audit performance.

  • Integrate with your SAP ECC, SAP S/4HANA, SAP Signavio solutions, and more for continous control and risk monitoring.

  • Establish clear responsibilities and collaboration across all three lines.

Key benefits

Get real-time insight into control status and key issues

Monitor controls continuously, streamline testing, and reduce risk.

Gain visibility into emerging risks and opportunities

Track risk levels, risk drivers, and key risk indicators continuously across your company.

Adopt a more strategic, audit-advisory role

Choose high-value issues for further investigation and gain more precise insights with real-time audit analytics.

Key features

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Improve compliance

Establish a single platform to manage multiple regulatory policies and compliance procedures, and optimize control assessment and testing activities.

Anticipate risks for operational resiliency

Analyze and report on risks by documenting events, incidents, finding relationships, and tracking root causes and consequences.

Optimize audits

Accelerate the resolution of audit issues by reducing repeat findings and visualizing results.

Pricing

See how customers are succeeding with SAP

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Transforming internal control and audit management

Discover how Pfizer streamlined controls performance with centralized review and eliminated manual controls execution.

Read the customer story 

Resources

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Understanding SAP’s product strategy for GRC solutions

Learn how SAP GRC solutions continue to evolve, providing customers with new innovations to deliver additional value, streamline processes, and improve the end-user experience.

Read the blog post 
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Establishing accountability across the three lines model

Find out how SAP solutions for three lines of defense help establish clear responsibilities, accountabilities, and oversight roles for managing risks, controls, and compliance across an enterprise.

Read the blog post 
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Unleashing artificial intelligence for regulatory insights with SAP

Discover an SAP BTP service for end-to-end regulatory intelligence that offers analytical insights into control coverage and gap analysis and recommendations.

Read the blog post 
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What risks to look out for in 2026

Explore ten business threats for this year in the area of governance, risk, and compliance and how SAP GRC solutions can mitigate these risks.

Read the blog post 

Technical and security resources

SAP Help Portal

Visit SAP Help Portal to find detailed documentation, guides, and articles to help you implement, configure, and optimize SAP products.

See what analysts are saying about SAP

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SAP recognized a Leader across critical GRC categories

Learn why Chartis Research believes SAP solutions provide the support businesses need to achieve their GRC goals.

Read the report

Get started

Jump-start your implementation and drive ROI by collaborating with industry experts, consultants, and support engineers throughout your journey.

Services

Transform your business quickly and effectively by taking advantage of our holistic service and support plans, expert consulting services, custom application development, proven best practices, and deep industry and technical knowledge.

Explore our services 

Support

Help keep your SAP solutions running at peak performance with our IT experts and support services, including long-term plans, embedded teams, remote technology support, self-service portal, and innovation strategies.

Visit the support portal 

Additional solutions

Explore additional products related to three lines of defense.

SAP Process Control

Automate processes and compliance management to help run your businesses more confidently with simplified internal control programs.

Explore the product
SAP Risk Management

Gain powerful enterprise risk management capabilities that support risk identification, assessment, analysis, and monitoring.

Explore the product
SAP Audit Management

Align your entire business with critical risks and controls to pave the way to improved audit quality and trusted insight.

Explore the product

Frequently asked questions

Three lines of defense is an organizational framework from the Institute of Internal Auditors (IIA). It is designed to be an adapted model that helps organizations identify structures and processes that best assist the achievement of the organization's objectives and facilitate strong governance and risk management.

Since organizations need effective structures and processes to enable the achievement of their objectives, the intent of the three lines model is to provide a framework that best assists them in this endeavour and that enables well-organized governance and risk management.  To do so, the IIA has identified key stakeholders who need to collaborate to contribute to the creation and protection of value for the organization. For more details, read the blog post Estabilishing Accountability Across the Three Lines (of Defense) Model.

By embedding the integrated solutions for a three lines model into the very foundation of their software landscape, organizations can automate tasks and decision-making, gain real-time visibility on their compliance status, and equip their people to anticipate and respond to the risks standing in the way of achieving business objectives.

 

Solutions for three lines help:

  • Establish clear responsibilities and collaboration across all three lines.

  • Automate key control and risk management activities.

  • Identify and mitigate compliance issues.

  • Facilitate audit engagement and improve audit performance.

  • Improve business performance and decrease the cost and effort of managing GRC activities with a single-source of truth.

SAP S/4HANA Cloud for financial three lines of defense is a package offering that helps SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition customers shift to remote, continuous, and risk-adjusted management to drive down risk and compliance costs while building trust. It includes SAP Process Control, SAP Risk Management, and SAP Audit Management.

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