Busi­ness lead­ers are always quick to opine about the accel­er­at­ing pace of inno­va­tion, but rarely have the con­text to under­stand how fast it real­ly is. And some­times, all that’s need­ed is a sim­ple time­line that shows how glob­al tech­nol­o­gy providers have advanced from an on-premise land­scape to one that is increas­ing­ly in the cloud. 

If we start the time­line at 1999, inno­va­tion pro­gressed rel­a­tive­ly and pre­dictably slow with one or two prod­ucts being released every one or two years. Then as soft­ware providers — includ­ing SAP — began to focus their devel­op­ment resources and invest­ments to become a cloud com­pa­ny in 2012, tech­nol­o­gy advanced faster and more intel­li­gent­ly year after year. And now, we’re at the point where appli­ca­tions and cer­ti­fi­ca­tions can be designed, deliv­ered, and imple­ment­ed in a mat­ter of months.

The speed at which new busi­ness solu­tions are intro­duced nowa­days is undoubt­ed­ly mind-bog­gling. But it also pos­es a lev­el of risk that comes with a star­tling high price tag.

Con­fronting a $10,000-Per-Minute ​“Incon­ve­nience”

“We often see appli­ca­tions, such as those from SAP, as the pri­ma­ry sys­tem oper­at­ing the enter­prise. As such, down­time is not only frowned upon, but also an expen­sive prob­lem,” observed Jim O’Donnell, an SAP alliance solu­tion archi­tect at Red Hat.

Ponemon Insti­tute report­ed that just one minute of down­time in a data cen­ter or crit­i­cal appli­ca­tion costs the aver­age enter­prise almost $10,000 in 2019 — and that fig­ure has steadi­ly increased over the past five years.

To put it into con­text, that one minute of down­time can cost 38 times more than the mon­ey Michael Jor­dan made each minute dur­ing the height of his career. Of course, no busi­ness can afford to pay such a price tag on any giv­en day. But 38 times more for just one minute? That’s insane.

For years, I have heard ASUG mem­bers express the same sen­ti­ment, and they have invest­ed a great deal of time and cap­i­tal into ensur­ing that down­time is as rare as pos­si­ble. Being par­tic­u­lar­ly sen­si­tive to ser­vice inter­rup­tions, they have become experts in fend­ing off down­time, par­tic­u­lar­ly the unplanned variety.

“Red Hat’s research shows that SAP cus­tomers’ efforts are work­ing,” O’Donnell said. ​“Unplanned down­time only accounts for approx­i­mate­ly 10% of all down­time. About half of unex­pect­ed out­ages come from human error or malfea­sance. The oth­er half stems from fail­ures in the exter­nal deploy­ment envi­ron­ment or infra­struc­ture, such as issues with change con­trol and net­work mon­i­tor­ing and security.”

Find­ing Vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties Before They Can Become Real Issues

Like most engi­neer­ing chal­lenges, unplanned down­time can­not be ​“fixed” by throw­ing con­sid­er­able mon­ey at it. Instead, busi­ness­es need a com­pre­hen­sive strat­e­gy for automa­tion, inte­gra­tion, cloud-ready DevOps, and con­tainer­ized delivery.

Accord­ing to O’Donnell, ​“Regard­less of where SAP work­loads run in a hybrid cloud land­scape, cus­tomers that build on a ​‘Red Hat first’ foun­da­tion to mod­ern­ize their SAP soft­ware land­scape can sig­nif­i­cant­ly reduce unplanned down­time. But that’s not all. They can real­ize oth­er advan­tages such as low­er oper­at­ing costs, improved mar­gins, bet­ter uti­liza­tion of IT staff, con­tin­u­ous inno­va­tion, and increased agili­ty and deployment.”

The busi­ness goal is to reduce the cost and impact of rou­tine main­te­nance of the data­base, appli­ca­tions, oper­at­ing sys­tems, and ser­vices, which is most com­mon­ly enabled in a two-tier archi­tec­ture. This approach applies to any care for a data­base serv­er, whether it’s a patch or para­me­ter for SAP HANA or anoth­er oper­at­ing sys­tem, tun­ing, or hard­ware main­te­nance. The ulti­mate cri­te­ri­on is ful­ly automat­ing the process to low­er (if not elim­i­nate) risk.

“While absolute zero down­time may be tech­ni­cal­ly impos­si­ble to achieve, no win­dow or service

inter­rup­tion should impact users, batch process­es, or oth­er upstream or down­stream sys­tems. We found the best way to achieve this ide­al sce­nario is imple­ment­ing an automa­tion plat­form,” O’Donnell advised.

Fuel­ing Future Growth with High Availability

Busi­ness­es depend on their crit­i­cal busi­ness sys­tems for their cur­rent sur­vival and future growth. One unplanned out­age not only leads to sig­nif­i­cant finan­cial loss, but also risks the trust and con­fi­dence of cus­tomers and employ­ees. And all too often, this out­come results in closed accounts, lost sales, and tal­ent turnover.

Long-time SAP part­ners, such as Red Hat, under­stand the val­ue of set­ting a foun­da­tion of great design, speed, and high avail­abil­i­ty when help­ing SAP cus­tomers keep up with the pace of tech­nol­o­gy inno­va­tion. With their guid­ance, busi­ness­es can regain the cost of down­time as much as pos­si­ble to deliv­er greater val­ue to their employ­ees and cus­tomers and move ahead the competition.

Want to learn more about improv­ing your migra­tion? Reg­is­ter for ASUG­FOR­WARD and watch ses­sions fea­tur­ing SAP cus­tomers and experts on demand.