SAP deployment more than applications: Automation in infrastructure and system operation

It would be wonderful: After many months of project work, the switch to the SAP ERP ECC successor SAP S/4 Hana as the heart of the company's IT has been successful, the new SAP application landscape is up and running and you don't have to worry about a thing. Of course, long-standing company IT employees know that such thoughts belong in the realm of utopia.

A lot of work or activities have to be carried out on SAP systems from day one of production. Usually less on the applications and more on the SAP IT infrastructure. Every day that SAP is used in a company changes the database systems used, every month there is a patch day for SAP security (Notes), the SAP kernel, which is important for all SAP applications and is in use, has to be updated again and again, as does the Hana database and the operating system used. Or a system copy of the SAP financial system has to be created for corporate financial management or an SAP system copy for compliance reasons. And these are just a few of the tasks and activities that arise in an SAP system environment practically from day one of SAP.

The SAP Basis sets it up

Various IT infrastructure teams or the so-called SAP Basis are responsible for this in SAP user companies, with quite a few specialized and experienced employees. Companies that have a high level of SAP system operation expertise of their own keep the SAP applications running like a well-oiled machine.

The diverse tasks of SAP Basis have not diminished over time, and neither has the overall expenditure on SAP. More and more SAP Basis departments are therefore rethinking and imposing a kind of fitness cure on themselves based on automation tools.
This also correlates with figures from the Gartner Group, which last year put the volume of automation for "internal" IT worldwide at around one billion US dollars.

However, it is still the case that when it comes to SAP decisions in companies, such as operating S/4 Hana itself (on-premises, IaaS public cloud) as a cloud solution (SAP Rise, SAP Grow), SAP Basis or SAP IT infrastructure teams are unfortunately usually not at the table. This results in a kind of truncated view. Opportunities, cost savings or efficiency gains, but also really well-functioning and always up-to-date SAP
systems are thus squandered.

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