Rajeev Menon is vice president, SAP practice, at Wharfedale Technologies Inc. During his career he has held several positions with various responsibilities for SAP software. In this Q&A article, I asked him to share some challenges he or his clients have faced during various implementation or upgrade projects. In your current role one of your responsibilities is blueprinting for SAP in a private cloud. Could you discuss some of the challenges you face when helping clients set up a blueprint for running an SAP application in a private cloud? We look at the cloud as a set of powerful technologies that a company can leverage to optimize and increase return on their technology investments. In the beginning, challenges included customer distrust, migration, application integration, service level agreements (SLAs), and disaster recovery; however, recently, the challenges are greater in IT management and control. Self-service portals and utility computing models challenge traditional IT management processes and create friction between IT and end users. Also, the cloud enables faster service delivery; this sometimes causes challenges in change management for the user community and results in user dissatisfaction. Could you give some examples of the friction between IT and end users that you mentioned? Also, why would faster service delivery cause change management challenges for the users? Traditionally, IT is managed in silos. For example, take the case of storage. Usually a storage administrator or a team is responsible for provisioning storage for a new system, but in the case of a true cloud, the computing, storage, memory, and other resources are grouped as pools and assigned to self-service portals for automatic provisioning with the right security, policies, and procedures. This simplifies and accelerates system provisioning, but inadequate policies and procedures can create waste as well as operational management challenges for IT and, in turn, create tension between IT and the user community. The fast provisioning can be further optimized using catalogs of system templates, so the end result is a shorter implementation cycle for new applications. A new application can bring changes to existing processes and procedures, and a lot of organizations fail to plan for accelerated training for the end users of the application in parallel to implementation. This can lead to user resentment and dissatisfaction. You’re also involved with SAP landscape migration to public and private clouds. Do your clients express a lot of concern about security of their data when you speak with them about migrating to a public or private cloud? Yes they do, in a positive way.  Most of our customers are very educated about security, and it is their (and our) responsibility to make sure their data is secure and compliant. We will try to understand the customer-specific security and compliance requirements and address them. These include infrastructure multi-tenancy, data center security, application authentication, network security, and user security. When you were senior manager, SAP practice, at Wharfedale Technologies, one of your duties was end-to-end performance assessment of infrastructure and application tiers. Could you explain the steps involved with an end-to-end performance assessment of an SAP system? Identifying the root cause of SAP performance problems is not always straightforward. Multiple SAP systems, federated databases, and increasingly complex business processes can make diagnosis considerably more challenging. It is important to analyze each stack in software and infrastructure. We use a top-down approach to identify bottlenecks. We start at the application layer and work through database, operating system, storage subsystems, and the network. In our experience, the majority of times it is not one, but a combination of issues in multiple layers that can cause performance problems. End-to-end testing was in the news recently after the US government had problems with its healthcare Web site. Apparently, the IT teams involved with this project didn’t allot enough time for end-to-end testing. Could you comment on end-to-end testing? Coming back to my earlier point,  cloud technology enables a rapid delivery of infrastructure and applications, and organizations sometimes may not allocate enough time for user training, change management, and testing. Cloud technologies may reduce overall testing times compared with traditional environments, but companies should not ignore the value of comprehensive stress and user acceptance testing. Your background also includes SAP disaster recovery design and implementation for virtual and physical landscapes. Could you discuss some of the challenges organizations face when designing and implementing disaster recovery processes for an SAP system? Current SAP systems landscapes are complex and interconnected. Apart from recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO), the biggest challenge is always to design and implement a disaster recovery solution that can recover all SAP systems in the same point in time. This is known as federated recovery. In a virtualized or cloud world, the tools for implementation might change, but the challenge remains the same. Regarding all the new technologies such as mobile apps, cloud computing, and analytics of big data that are important in business today, what advice would you give to a client who asked you what area of technology is the most important one on which to focus in order to remain competitive? Big data analytics. I look at mobile apps and cloud computing as enablers for big data analytics; cloud technologies will help reduce the cost of big data infrastructure, and mobile apps will provide more ways of information consumption and help increase customer adoption. Big data analytics will enable companies to make more informed decisions faster and accurately in real time. In order to remain competitive, it is important for companies to look into big data analytics.