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Choosing the Right Cloud: Capacity Management, Security & Cost

Traditionally, enterprises use multiple clouds optimized for different types of workloads. Although having a variety of different assets can pose cloud capacity management challenges and lead to fragmentation, the benefits generally outweigh the drawbacks. With the next-generation cloud, companies can now combine the advantages of single vendors with those of individually-optimized clouds. However, it’s still important to ask the right questions to understand the requirements of your workload.

Enterprise Cloud Workload Questions

Is the workload built for the web-scale?

·   There is a common reference that describes servers as either pets or cattle. Many modern applications are built for web-scale — that is, they run on a distributed server farm, where there’s no single point of failure. If one server dies, it doesn’t matter — you can just add another into the mix. That makes them like a herd of cattle — each one is replaceable.

·   This makes cloud capacity management simple. If you have more traffic, you just “scale out” or “scale horizontally” by adding more servers. This is how massive cloud services like AWS and Google work.

·   Traditional workloads such as the SAP HANA cloud are more like pets. They run on carefully configured servers (or virtualized servers) designed for high uptime and throughput. If your server gets “sick,” you need to nurse it back to health. Cloud capacity management is more complicated, as you need to add resources to the existing server. These applications run better on a managed cloud, where they can be maintained more carefully.

How important is security?

You need to consider what value the data holds for the company, and what the consequences would be if it were exposed. Does it contain intellectual property, customer financial information, or other sensitive data? What regulatory compliance regimes are you subject to?

In the public cloud, security is your responsibility. Your team will be on the hook for tasks like hardening your network, supervising users, and detecting and repelling cyber-attacks. In an SAP managed services cloud, your provider may share or completely take on the responsibility. Some providers also offer next-generation firewalls and other managed security services that help protect sensitive data. In most cases, this provides a superior level of security to onsite IT, while controlling costs.

If your data is highly sensitive, it needs to be protected on multiple levels, from physical access to the servers themselves, up through the application layer. Network security architecture practices, such as segmentation can help defend against intrusions, and minimize the consequences of potential security incidents.

In some cases, companies may benefit from physically isolating the servers holding key data from the rest of the network. This requires excellent capacity planning to ensure the physical architecture continues to meet your needs.

How critical is the cloud workload to your business?

The consequence of downtime or performance degradation depends on the criticality of the cloud. Cheap public cloud vendors can be a good choice for saving money in testing and development, and their scalability makes cloud capacity management a breeze in those applications.

However, these vendors guarantee almost nothing, aside from uptime — your system can slow to a crawl without violating SLAs. That means they’re not a good choice for mission-critical workloads or applications that bring in revenue. ERP workloads like SAP Cloud Identity services need high uptime and performance and are better off in a managed cloud, were careful configuration and maintenance guarantee good performance.

Next-Generation Converged by Cloud Platform

Earlier companies were compelled to use multiple clouds and multiple platforms in the cloud to address various applications. Because Cloud capacity management was difficult and resource utilization in the cloud was often poor. With next-generation cloud converged cloud platforms, organizations now have control over the cost of traditional workloads, and accommodating the high performance and security needs are been provided by enterprise workloads like SAP.

Enterprises demand an exceptional level of service from their partners, and your managed cloud provider should be no different. Saving money on hosting isn’t saving money if you can’t depend on low latency, consistent resources, and ultra-high uptime.

Commodity cloud providers are content with building systems out of hardware that work reasonably well most of the time and put the onus on you to have a backup plan when things break. While that solution might work for them, your enterprise requires a more reliable approach.

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Four tips to overcome four common challenges to implement SAP HANA

CIOs that embed analytics in their companies generate 35.7% more revenue (source: IBM) than industry peers. This significant value creation is possible because these leading companies can exploit the large volumes of data their employees require to make smarter, timely decisions.

Last year, SAP unveiled what many experts consider to be the industry's most advanced real-time, in-memory database for business applications. Not surprisingly, companies have jumped at the opportunity to exploit this new and exciting technology to gain a competitive advantage. 

Since its launch, Many Companies involved in several SAP HANA projects, from design to post-implementation.

Following my conversations with CIOs, it is clear that companies have faced four main challenges to the successful deployment of SAP HANA. I have summarized these here so you can avoid costly problems in the future.

Develop a change management strategy for SAP HANA

This may not come as a surprise to you, but change management is the biggest problem. The SAP NetWeaver platform - on which the SAP Business Suite products are built - enforces technical change management that has to be configured and maintained before you can move developed changes into a live system.

However, with SAP HANA, none of this is enforced and it requires a set of best practices to be applied to the system, to avoid changes being made inadvertently. In most cases, I find this is not set up in the system. What's more, SAP Solution Manager can be configured to perform the change management process semi-automatically, but it is not usually configured to work this way.

In addition, I often find that the "extreme agile" approach that SAP and other SIs want to take requires changes to be made to inflexible change management processes. A middle ground of agile change management needs to be embedded within the organization.

Tip: Review the change management process to ensure these have been adopted for SAP HANA, including its technology components. 

2.   Know your skills gap with SAP HANA

SAP HANA introduces new IT assets - appliances, and software - into an organization. These require skills that are often in short supply, including: 1) installing, configuring, and maintaining these new IT assets; and, 2) developing new best practices to ensure maximum use of SAP HANA.

Technology platforms are often on different versions and configured differently. What's worse is I find that technology components within a stack have been installed incorrectly. Bad things happen in this case, especially as it relates to performance, stability, and integration of new technologies. 

Tip: Ensure you have a process to keep the technology platform consistent and that you have a hardware and business continuity strategy for SAP HANA.

3.   Drive performance by design

SAP HANA is an amazingly fast database platform - it can do many tasks thousands of times faster than other RDBMS. However, it is not a panacea and bad designs run slow on SAP HANA, just like on any other platform. What's more, there are things you need to know about SAP HANA's development that are significantly different from deploying a technology .

For example, I had one customer who was conducting performance tests of SAP HANA. In collaboration with the company, data load performance was improved by 50x by applying the best practices SAP BPT Solutions has developed by working with many organizations. It's important to design for performance, rather than assume that SAP HANA will get you out of trouble.

Tip: Put in place robot design guidelines and developer standards for SAP HANA, including how your SAP HANA specialists are continuously up-skilled and trained to address future changes.

4.    Outpace the pace of change 

One of the amazing things about SAP HANA is the pace of change. There are new elements of functionality coming in each major release. This is every six months. This pace of change poses challenges (and opportunities!) to some organizations because the latest version of SAP HANA may contain something you didn't know you could have.

This includes performance benefits, improved non-functional requirements e.g. point-in-time Backup or Fault Tolerance, functional capabilities like new certified 3rd party integration tools, developer features like debuggers, and whole new technology components like the integrated HANA XS web application server.

Tip: Implement a process to review all of your standards every six months, after a major SAP HANA release. This way, you will be able to plan to take advantage of all the newly released functionality.

Conclusion

SAP HANA has opened up new opportunities for companies to compete smarter using the latest advanced business applications and analytics required by employees to make better, timely decisions. Whether you're a CIO or an IT manager leading the ERP Migrations , you should be aware of the four most common challenges other organizations have faced when deploying one of the most exciting new enterprise technologies to come onto the market in the past few years.

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Hiring Employees Best Practices

According to SHRM’s Human Capital Benchmarking Report, the average cost-per-hire is $4,129, while the average time it takes to fill a position is 42 days.

That’s a pretty hefty price to pay and a lot of time to spend. Think of it as an investment. As such, you’ll want to get it right the first time.

To assist your organization with its staffing needs, we’ve assembled the following 9 steps to ensure you’re hiring in the most efficient way.

The 9-Step Process

Determination of Vacant Position – Determine the need to fill a new role or existing position and outline a budget that considers available compensation, cost of benefits, and recruiting.

Position Development and Compensation – Create a job description that is clear and non-discriminatory, and review the budget or develop a pay range and as per SAP Payroll Control Center for more accurate details for payment.

Job Posting – Identify the internal and external advertising platforms available to you. Consider internal applicants and employee referrals.

Applicant Sourcing – Set aside blocks of time to review resumes. Develop a system to manage the evaluation process such as the Score System: placing resumes in one of 3 categories – 1-Move to the next step, 2-Unsure at this time, and 3-Pass.

Screen Applicants – Phone screen the top prospects to reduce the candidate pool. Reject those with disqualifying factors, ensuring your decision is nondiscriminatory. Schedule in-person interviews with your top candidates.

In-Person Interviews – Ask detailed questions to assess the candidates’ personal presentation, and nonverbal communication, and determine compatibility with the position and organization.

The Offer – Although not required by law, an offer letter is best practice. It should include job title, full-time/part-time and exempt or non-exempt classification, benefits offered, and start date.

Background Checks – If you will be running a background check, you must comply with the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), along with any state requirements.

Onboarding – Once the candidate is cleared to start, it’s time to begin the onboarding process. When done right, you will set your new employee up for a successful and rewarding career within your organization.

Location, location, location

When determining where to advertise a job posting, consider the following venues: your company’s website, intranet, LinkedIn, social media, job boards, local colleges, job fairs, industry-specific networks. 

Prevent the flood

Create a designated email inbox where resumes will be received. Your inbox will thank you.

Avoid contractual implications

Your offer letter should include a statement that the employment is at will and avoid language that classifies the candidate as a “permanent” employee or guarantees length of employment (unless temporary or fixed-period project). And HCM Solutions and other softwares related to HR can help in all ways.

Build a prospect pipeline

During the recruiting process, keep an eye out for resumes that may fit another position within the organization. Your “not quite right” may one day be your “perfect fit.” The more talented prospects in your pipeline, the better!

Consider an Applicant Tracking System (ATS)

Technology, like an ATS, can reduce the time it takes busy hiring managers to screen candidates. An ATS can sort through thousands of resumes to determine the best fit candidates, keep tabs on the hiring process, and even communicate directly with applicants.

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SAP HANA vs. Hadoop – What You Need to Know

Some key differences between Hadoop and SAP HANA make each one different kind of data within an enterprise. Using integration technologies like SAP HANA Vora, you can make Hadoop data available within the HANA framework. Knowing when to use each solution will give you the ability to do more with your data so you can make better decisions.

THE HANA WAY

SAP HANA is designed to give you fast access to the data you need at your fingertips. Most data scientists call this Enterprise data, and it includes bids, sales and purchase orders, parts inventory, manufacturing data, shipping schedules, and accounting. HANA stores application data in local memory in columns, which is unlike traditional databases that store data in rows. The benefit of HANA’s data format is that it’s available much faster, almost in real-time when combined with in-memory architecture.

THE HADOOP WAY

Hadoop stores large amounts of data on distributed and clustered hardware. It’s designed for big data, such as data from sensors, cameras, RFID readers, office documents, social media, scans, and more. As you can probably guess, that kind of data does not fit neatly in a column or a row. However, this data can be invaluable if you can find ways to format and read it so that you can compare it with other data. The biggest benefit of Hadoops’ data format is that it’s not very expensive to store incredible amounts of data that you can process over time.

HOW TO USE THEM TOGETHER: SAP HANA & HADOOP INTEGRATION

SAP BTP solutions offers two ways to use HANA and Hadoop in concert. The first is Spark, which is the fast engine you need for the large-scale data processing that Hadoop requires. Spark lets you structure your Hadoop data so that it can be accessed through the SAP HANA Spark Controller and queried using SQL. It’s not the easiest tool to use, but it does combine SQL, streaming, and complex analytics.

SAP HANA Vora changes that. It sits on top of Spark as an in-memory query engine to get enriched analytics from Hadoop. With its interactive interface, Vora allows data scientists to model data and process it for visualization or analysis. It can work exclusively on Hadoop to provide that interface to your big data, or with HANA to extend your analytics across both Enterprise data and Big Data. It was designed to perform Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) for big-data analysis; however, it has evolved because of its bi-directional ability to read HANA data and write back to it. This eliminates the need to export and move HANA data to HDFS to run analysis. Instead, Vora builds structured data hierarchies for Hadoop data that it can store in memory to run like HANA at similar speeds.

WHAT HADOOP CAN AND CAN NOT DO

Hadoop is ideal for analyzing and working with a wide variety of data sources and types, such as social media feeds, office documents, charts, and graphs – anything that would be cumbersome to manage in database tables. It’s designed to help you see patterns in massive amounts of data, such as social media topics and sentiments, purchasing patterns, and building trends for recommendation engines like Amazon. Hadoop has the ability to store all of your raw data, not just the processed data that is now out of date and needs to be moved to longer-term storage instead of in memory.

In short, Hadoop offers enterprises one of the most affordable ways to consume massive amounts of data that you don’t need daily. Data that you can then run batch jobs to process because you don’t need it in real-time.

On the other hand, using Hadoop for near real-time transactional data processing would be a disaster. Transactional data is typically very complex and needs to be handled in milliseconds, not overnight. Using Hadoop for any application that requires fast processing of data, such as online help or searchable websites, would not keep your customers happy.

WHAT HANA CAN AND CAN NOT DO

SAP HANA, on the other hand, stores data in memory, which makes it fast to access but expensive to keep.Erp Migrations is designed to store transactional data that is accessed and aggregated often and in different ways. Everything that Hadoop is not good for, HANA excels at – online transactional processing, customer-facing search and query and anything that demands fast performance.

However, in-memory storage is almost logarithmically more expensive than disk storage. Consequently, HANA may not be cost-effective for looking at larger data sets, such as census data or seasonal buying trends for the past five years.

WHY YOU MIGHT WANT BOTH

Now you can see why you might want to have both transactional and big data. Using SAP HANA Vora, you could compare big data, such as seasonal buying trends for the past five years, and compare it in real-time to the transactional data that tells you what’s happening in your online store. This allows you to spot issues and advantages much faster. The combination would show you that the spike you are seeing today might only last three months, so you can take maximum advantage of it, knowing its lifespan. On the other hand, you would avoid mistaking this as a long-term trend and overstocking merchandise that will be hard to sell in a couple of months.

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Charting the Course to SAP HANA Cloud

The push towards SAP HANA cloud shift stems from the need for agility and responsiveness in a dynamic business climate. The cloud promises reduced infrastructure expenses, robust data analytics, and the nimbleness to address changing needs quickly. However, for many companies, transitioning from on-premise SAP HANA to the cloud involves navigating concerns around data security, performance, and potentially relinquishing control of business-critical ERP systems.

SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud: A Tailored Offering

In light of these challenges, SAP presented the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud (HEC), a private cloud service designed expressly for mission-critical workloads. HEC advertises no compromise on performance, integration, security, failover, or disaster recovery. It spotlights versatility, strong customer support, and end-to-end coverage - from strategic planning to application management. This offering intends to provide the cloud’s agility and innovation under SAP’s direct guidance and expertise.

Actual Delivery of HANA Enterprise Cloud

Despite SAP’s messaging, the HEC’s delivery involves a consortium of third-party providers, including HPE, IBM, CenturyLink, Dimension Data, and Virtustream. SAP collaborates with these partners, who bid on projects often awarded to the lowest bidder, to leverage specialized capabilities while upholding SAP’s standards.

Weighing the Pros and Cons

Partnering with competent vendors ensures clients receive secure, best-practice SAP hosting and support. HEC’s comprehensive solution integrates licensing, infrastructure, and support with touted scalability and integration.

However, several customer challenges emerge. Firstly, leveraging SAP’s brand for cloud hosting and SAP managed services risks diminishing anticipated cost savings. Secondly, the lack of direct engagement with third-party providers raises concerns about entrusting critical ERP operations to unseen partners. This dynamic obscures visibility and control over SAP HANA migration and management.

Furthermore, the absence of a direct relationship between SAP HANA users and cloud suppliers may complicate support, especially for urgent issues warranting rapid response. While SAP’s ecosystem aims to guarantee quality and security, intermediation can hinder the timely resolution of critical situations, affecting system uptime and operations.

SAP HANA Cloud: A Strategic Decision

As SAP systems become increasingly vital, migrating SAP HANA is not simply a technical or operational choice but a strategic one. SAP HANA transcends a database or software suite – it constitutes a competitive advantage that, when optimized, can spur tremendous innovation and success. This migration necessitates meticulous planning, execution, and governance to ensure the transition empowers rather than compromises SAP HANA’s strategic value.

In this context, selecting the ideal cloud model and service providers represents critical decisions. Companies must scrutinize partners beyond cost, evaluating track records, SAP skills, security protocols, and the aptitude to deliver personalized, responsive service.

The Future SAP HANA Cloud Trajectory

As we advance into 2024, the SAP DATA Cloud Analytics landscape continues evolving. Innovations in cloud technology, security, and service creation provide new prospects for migration planning. Firms must stay updated on cloud service advancements, SAP’s strategic direction, and cloud shift best practices to navigate this transition successfully.

To accomplish this, companies should:

Collaborate cross-functionally to align SAP HANA cloud plans with broader business goals and technology roadmaps.

Ensure chosen cloud environments and suppliers meet rigorous data security, privacy, and regulatory standards.

Assess infrastructure ability to support SAP HANA performance requirements and scale amid fluctuating demands.

Institute clear governance and support structures for effective issue resolution throughout and post-migration.

Transitioning SAP HANA to the cloud is complex but ultimately rewarding, unlocking efficiency, agility, and innovation when executed deliberately. By weighing the strategic, operational, and technical dynamics, businesses can drive this migration smoothly, fully capturing SAP HANA’s power to fuel future prosperity.