Tips for Avoiding Common Pitfalls When Modernizing the SAP Landscape

New technologies such as internet of things (IoT) and machine learning pose new challenges to companies, and businesses are contemplating how and where to use them to improve their business. The key is to seamlessly put immense amounts of data to work and automate the routine, while securing the whole. Companies that want to achieve such a digital transformation are undertaking projects to modernize their SAP landscapes. Common concerns and questions they have include: “Will my data be secure?” or “Will my business operations be disrupted?”

During a recent interview, SAPinsider spoke with Erik Lillestolen, Senior Solutions Product Manager for SAP Data Center, Cisco, who authored the recent SAPinsider article, “Tracing Cisco’s Blueprint for a Successful SAP Data Center.” Lillestolen provided a glimpse at Cisco’s new SAP portfolio that includes tools designed to avoid common pitfalls such as over-spending on hardware, under-planning for migrations, and ensuring a secure operating environment.

According to Lillestolen, Cisco has tooled its solutions “bringing innovation around automation with profiles, ensuring governance/compliance through policy, and embedding our solutions with a broad security swipe. The Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS), Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI), and HyperFlex platforms simplify compute, storage, and network operations. SAP HANA is certified on all UCS platforms and HyperFlex.”

Automation for a smooth transition: All Cisco datacenter products simplify operation and automation projects enabling organizations to cut the time for deployments — from months to days, even to hours. Companies can declare their policies and profiles, creating an environment that is programmable and smart enough to know what should and should not be going on in that environment, Lillestolen noted in the interview. Compliance is a push of a button.

Managing data: SAP Data Hub now runs on a Cisco HyperFlex with the Cisco Container Platform (CCP). Now, the on-premise structured data can be analyzed with IoT data, for example. Companies can bring different data sources together to provide a broader view of the market, and they can tie the big data experience with traditional transaction data. The solution was jointly developed by SAP and Cisco.

Ensuring security: Turning the security strategy upside down, Cisco builds security into its SAP solutions, working to protect data from the moment of deployment through the lifetime of the data. Lillestolen described the security model as a locked door requiring a pass code: “Only specific transactions are allowed to happen. You can only do this; you cannot do anything else.” Then Cisco Tetration monitors the infrastructure level, and Cisco AppDynamics monitors at the application level, providing a holistic view of what is really going on in the system. This is an unprecedented level of assurance that has been difficult to achieve before now.

Read more of Lillestolen’s observations about the new SAP platform here. For information about Cisco’s cybersecurity offerings, attend the webinar “How to Keep Your SAP Hybrid Cloud Workloads Secure”.