So, let’s assume we have obtained an IP address (i.e. The other layers are interesting and very important to understand (mobile app connectivity, anyone?), but they’re not overly relevant right now.
Let’s first recall the OSI model to understand where SSL (really, TLS) sits relative to other networking protocols we need for our HTTP communication example:īecause there are turtles all the way down, I’ll only focus on the highlighted sections above. This is nice because the ICM is more powerful than usually appreciated, and findings here with one system are broadly applicable to many of SAP’s products. The vast majority of SAP’s products – from old R/3 systems to HANA – use the Internet Communication Manager as the bridge between incoming HTTP traffic and the applications. HTTP – through Web Dynpro and NWBC – is the future anyhow -). To keep things simple, I will only look at HTTP rather than the DIAG protocol used by SAP GUI. I’m not going to worry about client-side CPU impact, as there are many more clients than servers, and they’re all multi-core systems running idle most of the time anyhow :-). Let’s try to get a handle on this by looking at the impact of switching to SSL to both network performance and server-side CPU load. To me this has always seemed strange because SAP applications contain a lot of information I thought companies would be interested in keeping safe and secure: customer data, accounting information, salary information, etc.Įvery time I asked the question of a Basis consultant though, I received an answer along the lines of “SSL introduces too much overhead”, or it “slows things down”.īut hang on, it’s 2013! Google searches are now all done over HTTPS by default, for 38,000 search queries per second! So how hard can it be?
I’ve often wondered why I see so many SAP systems which don’t offer SSL connections for their client applications, be they traditional SAP GUI clients, browsers running BSP or Web Dynpro applications or the IE runtime embedded into Netweaver Business Client.
0 kommentar(er)
