Securing the Digital Backbone of Global Industry

BOSTON, MA – December 03, 2025 – When a specialized cybersecurity firm receives a mainstream business award, it often signals a deeper shift in the industrial landscape. The recent recognition of Boston-based Onapsis on Inc.’s 2025 Best in Business list is one such moment. While the accolades for "Best in Innovation," "Enduring Impact," and its regional leadership in the "Northeast" are significant for the company, the true story lies in why its mission has become so critical to the global economy. Onapsis operates in a highly specialized, often overlooked domain: securing the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, particularly SAP, that form the digital backbone of modern industry. This award is a testament not just to one company's success, but to the dawning realization in boardrooms worldwide that the security of these core applications is now a cornerstone of operational resilience and competitive advantage.

The Invisible Engine Under Threat

For decades, SAP systems have been the invisible engines powering the world's largest corporations. These complex platforms manage everything from financial records and manufacturing processes to supply chain logistics and human resources. The scale is staggering: SAP software is used by 92% of the Global 2000 and touches an estimated 77% of the world's total transaction revenue. If these systems falter, the ripple effects can be catastrophic, halting production lines, snarling global supply chains, and exposing vast quantities of sensitive data.

Despite their criticality, these systems have historically existed in a security blind spot. Traditional cybersecurity solutions, designed for networks and endpoints, often lack the specific knowledge to understand the unique architecture, custom code, and complex authorization models of an SAP environment. This has created a fertile ground for attackers who have grown increasingly sophisticated. According to threat intelligence reports, ransomware incidents targeting SAP systems have surged by 400% since 2021. More recently, data exfiltration has emerged as the top-ranked threat, a worrying trend as companies centralize more data for AI initiatives.

"Each Best in Business honoree achieved a breakthrough moment this year," notes Bonny Ghosh, editorial director at Inc. "Some unveiled groundbreaking innovations... their projects and initiatives had a sizable impact on their company and even on their industry at large." For Onapsis, that breakthrough has been in methodically addressing this complex and growing threat landscape with a platform built for purpose.

A New Benchmark for Innovation and Impact

Onapsis's recognition for "Innovation" and "Enduring Impact" is rooted in its deep, focused expertise. The company’s claim as the global leader in its niche is substantiated by its status as the only SAP-endorsed solution of its kind and its use as the de-facto standard by major audit and consulting firms like Deloitte, KPMG, and IBM. This market position was not achieved by chance, but through relentless innovation driven by its acclaimed Onapsis Research Labs.

This internal threat intelligence group functions as the vanguard of SAP security, having discovered and helped mitigate over 1,000 zero-day vulnerabilities. Their research has been critical enough to warrant six separate alerts from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, highlighting the national-level importance of securing these enterprise systems. Findings from the labs—such as the discovery of attack chains like RECON and ICMAD that revealed new threat actor groups targeting SAP—are directly integrated into the Onapsis Platform. This provides customers with pre-patch protection and advanced threat intelligence that generic security tools cannot offer.

The platform itself translates this research into tangible industrial application. Features like the "SAP Notes Command Center" streamline the notoriously complex process of patching SAP systems, helping organizations prioritize vulnerabilities and validate that fixes are correctly implemented. With regulations like the EU's NIS2 Directive and new SEC disclosure rules demanding faster response to breaches, features like "Rapid Controls for Dangerous Exploits" become essential, enabling continuous monitoring for active threats against known vulnerabilities. This is the practical application of technology that transforms security from a reactive, compliance-driven cost center into a proactive enabler of business resilience.

Protecting the Transformation to the Cloud

The industrial world is in the midst of a massive digital transformation, with many organizations migrating their core SAP systems to the cloud through programs like RISE with SAP and S/4HANA. While this shift promises agility and efficiency, it also introduces a new layer of complexity and expands the potential attack surface. Hybrid environments, which combine on-premise systems with multiple cloud services and third-party applications, create new entry points that must be secured.

This is where Onapsis is demonstrating its forward-looking strategy. The company has developed solutions like its "Secure RISE Accelerator" specifically to de-risk these complex cloud migrations. By embedding security and compliance checks directly into the process, it helps organizations avoid costly project delays and ensures that their new cloud environments are secure from day one. Further innovation is seen in its support for modern development workflows, with integrations for platforms like Bitbucket and automated code scanning within CI/CD pipelines. This "shift-left" approach, which builds security into the earliest stages of development, is crucial for preventing vulnerabilities in the custom applications that are often built on top of the core SAP platform.

As Mariano Nunez, Co-founder and CEO of Onapsis, stated, the goal is to "protect global organizations that power our everyday lives." This mission statement encapsulates the broader significance of their work. By securing the business-critical applications that run manufacturing plants, manage global logistics, and process essential financial transactions, the company is providing the foundational security layer upon which future industrial innovation can be built.

The Inc. award, therefore, is more than just a corporate milestone. It is a spotlight on a critical, and rapidly maturing, segment of the industrial technology landscape. As physical and digital operations become inextricably linked, the security of the application layer is no longer a niche IT concern. It has become a fundamental pillar of business strategy, essential for safeguarding the very systems that drive the global economy.