Consulting Is More Important Than Ever

In the non-SAP environment, concepts such as DevOps, Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery have become standard. Developers as well as infrastructure and system managers work hand in hand to continuously offer new and high-quality solutions for better user experience and user satisfaction. People are no longer satisfied with mere products, but expect more, especially in terms of convenience and usability, personalized support, and performance. SAP Basis must also meet these requirements today. 

For companies, the unofficial motto has often been: "“If you don’t hear from SAP Basis, then everything’s fine.” However, that is no longer enough. Because IT, which used to be the driving force and trendsetter, has now itself become driven by business departments and diverse customer requirements. Systems have been built, expanded, but little optimized. Lift-and-shift sounds comfortable, and in fact systems are often adopted as they are into the cloud. Patches and upgrades are implemented only when it is absolutely necessary, but often as late as possible and usually only after pressure from the business departments regarding new functionalities. 

More than just outsourcing

If you compare this situation with the daily technological environment of users and customers, an immense gap becomes apparent. Employees are confronted with constantly growing complexity. Quick upgrades and patching are a thing of the past; today, the impact on business operations is high. In addition, dependencies are increasing and release cycles are decreasing—it is easy to lose track of everything. Security, peripheral systems, interfaces, AI and the connection to IoT solutions are just some of the new topics that must additionally be considered by SAP Basis employees. This is hardly feasible for one employee alone or even for a small SAP Basis team. 

In order to address these issues, the wide range of topics, and the demand for innovation and digitization, SAP Basis today needs to be more than outsourcing. A system based purely on operation and licenses no longer meets the complex customer requirements. Cloud providers such as Azure, AWS and Google may operate the hardware, but when it comes to driving SAP Basis innovation, they provide no input. That’s why individual consulting that takes digitization and innovation—and thus service—into consideration is more important than ever.

More complex than ever

Due to the complexity and diversity, service providers advise not only on lifecycle topics, but also on the optimization of architecture, infrastructure, security, and innovation—and do so continuously. They target the needs of their customers directly and offer individual support. For example, maintenance plans are drawn up to ensure that systems are kept up to date with the latest releases on an annual basis. Due to cyber threats, it is extremely important to identify vulnerabilities as quickly as possible and secure them through patches. Because of the complexity of the matter, routine is important; the entire process should be standardized and automated whenever possible—preferably using automated tests. Incidents should also be evaluated and projects launched that bring about sustainable and automated improvements and thus also provide ideas for digitization planning and innovation. This also includes regular housekeeping to ensure that systems are always running in a performant and stable manner. 

Visibility of systems results in control. To enable quick responses, 24/7 monitoring and real-time alerts are provided. Monitoring tools are equipped with AI so that anomalies can be detected faster and reported early or even identified ahead of time. Some of these monitoring tools, such as Avantra, also support automation of lifecycle tasks, promoting reliability and scaling. SAP Basis should not be ignored. You can catch up, you can expect more, you can achieve more. Take the next step.