Through­out his­to­ry, times of tur­moil and dis­rup­tion have led to a surge in inno­va­tion — shifts and break­throughs that don’t just get us through hard times, but leave us in bet­ter shape for the future, too. The year 2020, with all its upheaval and unknowns, pro­vides a clear exam­ple of this. Across indus­tries, the rush to trans­form ser­vice mod­els and data capa­bil­i­ties has reshaped the world of IT. 

I had a con­ver­sa­tion with Rob McLaugh­lin and Bri­an Stur­gis, SAP spe­cial­ists from Dell Tech­nolo­gies, about this trans­for­ma­tion. They shared four major lessons that they and their SAP cus­tomers are learn­ing dur­ing this unusu­al time. 

Les­son 1: Focus on cloud and build a cloud-first strat­e­gy.

Rob: In today’s con­di­tions, large vol­umes of expe­ri­en­tial data — from edge devices to cus­tomer engage­ment and mobile and ana­lyt­i­cal envi­ron­ments — are cre­at­ing a con­stant­ly evolv­ing expe­ri­ence. With­in this sce­nario, data access is tak­ing on a mas­sive role. Edge needs to process and send to the core, core sys­tems need data from pub­lic cloud, and pub­lic cloud sys­tems need data from the edge. 

To deal with this, the data strat­e­gy must incor­po­rate secu­ri­ty at every lev­el of the design and account for ingress, egress, per­for­mance, and avail­abil­i­ty. Under­stand­ing data access require­ments and the dynam­ics of data local­i­ty is key to cloud design, but with cur­rent shifts toward expand­ing dig­i­tal ser­vices, data access con­cerns are dri­ving cus­tomer con­ver­sa­tions more than ever. 

Bri­an: When you think about that, it is impor­tant to also remem­ber that ​“cloud” is not a par­tic­u­lar ​“place.” It is an oper­at­ing mod­el that neces­si­tates var­i­ous capa­bil­i­ties and out­comes that are essen­tial to the cur­rent, high­ly com­pet­i­tive busi­ness envi­ron­ment. We believe in devel­op­ing a cloud-first strat­e­gy. Once busi­ness require­ments and desired out­comes are clear­ly defined, iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of the most appro­pri­ate cloud sce­nar­ios — off-premise, host­ed, on-premise, pri­vate, and/​or hybrid — can be best determined. 

Les­son 2: Pre­pare for growth and per­for­mance and respond to dynam­ic shifts with scale and agility.

Bri­an: Giv­en the rel­a­tive­ly high cost of mem­o­ry for an SAP HANA envi­ron­ment when com­pared with tra­di­tion­al data­base stor­age, in this cli­mate we are see­ing SAP cus­tomers embrace data tier­ing more aggres­sive­ly. Data tier­ing helps cus­tomers man­age SAP HANA data more cost-effec­tive­ly by plac­ing ​“hot” data, that is, the most reg­u­lar­ly accessed data, in dynam­ic ran­dom-access mem­o­ry (DRAM) and Intel Optane per­sis­tent mem­o­ry. Less fre­quent­ly accessed ​“warm” data is going to loca­tions like SAP HANA Native Stor­age Exten­sion and SAP HANA exten­sion nodes, while least accessed ​“cold data” gets moved to SAP HANA spark con­troller, Apache Hadoop, and the like. This shift from an expen­sive, all-DRAM SAP HANA expe­ri­ence can yield sig­nif­i­cant cost sav­ings as cus­tomers pre­pare for their SAP HANA data sizes to grow. Many out there don’t real­ize that as they’re try­ing to do more with data while keep­ing costs in check, there’s a lot SAP already offers, and that they don’t have to spend as much as they might think.

Rob: As cus­tomers con­tin­ue to look at trans­form­ing SAP land­scapes from tra­di­tion­al rela­tion­al data­base man­age­ment sys­tem (RDBMS) plat­forms to SAP HANA and to SAP S/4HANA and SAP BW/4HANA, it’s imper­a­tive to under­stand the breadth of the SAP land­scape, the trans­for­ma­tion­al project approach, and the over­all time­line. SAP HANA envi­ron­ments are all about mem­o­ry. No mat­ter what’s going on today, the plat­form will need to evolve over time, allow­ing for future capa­bil­i­ties to be intro­duced into the scal­able build­ing block accord­ing to trans­for­ma­tion sched­ules. Vir­tu­al­iza­tion abstracts the phys­i­cal con­structs and allows for a log­i­cal con­tain­er that can move across the phys­i­cal lay­er, with­out intro­duc­ing any impact to the appli­ca­tion or end users. 

Les­son 3: Col­lapse data silos with edge, core, and cloud inte­gra­tion with arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence (AI) and machine learn­ing to accel­er­ate data-dri­ven insights.

Bri­an: The rise of edge com­put­ing has been a grow­ing real­i­ty for a while, but the events of 2020 have drawn its data man­age­ment con­se­quences into much greater focus. The need to inte­grate data across silos becomes extreme­ly crit­i­cal when essen­tial­ly all cus­tomer and employ­ee access and inter­ac­tion is tak­ing place remote­ly. The need among our SAP cus­tomers to have mod­ern, dynam­ic infra­struc­ture foun­da­tions upon which to embrace edge com­put­ing and cloud inte­gra­tion has become more vis­i­ble than ever before.

Rob: For decades, SAP envi­ron­ments were archi­tect­ed to care for the ​“oper­a­tional” side of the busi­ness. Teams were con­cerned about mate­r­i­al man­age­ment, ship­ping, accounts receiv­able, accounts payable, batch jobs com­plet­ing, etc. Basi­cal­ly, it was all about mak­ing sure busi­ness was up and run­ning and core trans­ac­tions were suc­cess­ful and time­ly. In today’s world, this ​“oper­a­tional” busi­ness is run­ning on an in-mem­o­ry plat­form that affords addi­tion­al capa­bil­i­ties. That’s why many cus­tomers are lever­ag­ing the plat­form to embrace expe­ri­en­tial data from the edge, ana­lyt­i­cal plat­forms, mobile, etc. This data can be cap­tured and processed to pro­vide addi­tion­al capa­bil­i­ties and enhance­ments to the way they do busi­ness. It’s a nev­er-end­ing feed­back loop, and the infra­struc­ture plat­form needs to be agile enough to allow for this evolv­ing framework. 

Les­son 4: Main­tain a secu­ri­ty-first mind­set, evolv­ing the data pro­tec­tion and secu­ri­ty focus in times of rapid change.

Bri­an: Data pro­tec­tion and data secu­ri­ty are always an area of con­cern in SAP envi­ron­ments, but when your entire access mod­el sud­den­ly shifts and avail­abil­i­ty win­dows expand, you become exposed to new vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties and uncer­tain­ties. Vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties can arise when cus­tomers oper­ate in hybrid or cross-cloud envi­ron­ments, for exam­ple. Late­ly, we’ve been help­ing address this through a vari­ety of mea­sures, includ­ing net­work vir­tu­al­iza­tion via VMware NSX. NSX pro­vides net­work seg­men­ta­tion and fire­walling that sim­pli­fies SAP net­work and appli­ca­tion secu­ri­ty deployments. 

Rob: Agreed. In addi­tion to that, the teams we typ­i­cal­ly work with love to have com­mand and con­trol over the data that they man­age, regard­less of where it’s locat­ed from a cloud per­spec­tive. Back­up, restore, and data repli­ca­tion have always been con­sid­ered ​“infra­struc­ture team” tasks, but in today’s envi­ron­ment we’re enabling appli­ca­tion own­ers and data­base admin­is­tra­tors with full data pro­tec­tion capa­bil­i­ties from with­in their stan­dard oper­a­tional tool set. Data­base admin­is­tra­tors can back up or restore direct­ly to and from the under­ly­ing data pro­tec­tion solu­tion, in any cloud that the envi­ron­ment is lever­ag­ing today, with­out wait­ing on oth­er teams. In oth­er words, true time to value.

The Jour­ney Ahead for Transformation

It’s impos­si­ble to quan­ti­fy the amount of trans­for­ma­tion that has hap­pened in just a few months, yet we can be sure more is on the way. That said, the refo­cus and retool­ing under­way is putting SAP busi­ness­es in a stronger, more agile posi­tion for ​“nor­mal” times, how­ev­er and when­ev­er they start pre­sent­ing themselves. 

In the next sev­er­al blog posts, we will explore in more detail each of the four major trends described above, as well as oth­ers that may emerge along the way. 

This is part one of a five-part series of blogs on this top­ic. Do you have ques­tions or com­ments regard­ing your own 2020 SAP expe­ri­ence? We would like to hear them and may include them in an upcom­ing post. 

Reg­is­ter for the Enter­prise Plan­ning Think Tank on Oct. 6 from 10:30 – 11:30 a.m. CT to share and learn from peers about nav­i­gat­ing chal­lenges and oppor­tu­ni­ties as you trans­form your orga­ni­za­tions. As always, we wel­come all ASUG mem­bers to sub­mit their ideas for blog posts they want to write.