SAP Basis

SAP Basis — The Air Traffic Control for SAP Landscapes

Like the air traffic control tower that efficiently and safely manages the air traffic into the airport, SAP Basis teams manage the diverse set of various SAP modules and the associated databases and operating systems so that large enterprises can run their day-to-day business on SAP reliably. Just as airplane travelers do not pay any thought to the air traffic control tower, business users are generally unaware of what happens behind the scenes to keep their processes running, their orders fulfilled, or their books closed.

However, the SAP Basis teams are a crucial factor in achieving business continuity, performance, security, and compliance. Hence, SAP Basis needs to be viewed as a strategic part of the business. Not doing so poses significant risks in terms of revenue and reputation loss.

SAP Basis — The Air Traffic Control for SAP Landscapes

Like the air traffic control tower that efficiently and safely manages the air traffic into the airport, SAP Basis teams manage the diverse set of various SAP modules and the associated databases and operating systems so that large enterprises can run their day-to-day business on SAP reliably. Just as airplane travelers do not pay any thought to the air traffic control tower, business users are generally unaware of what happens behind the scenes to keep their processes running, their orders fulfilled, or their books closed.

However, the SAP Basis teams are a crucial factor in achieving business continuity, performance, security, and compliance. Hence, SAP Basis needs to be viewed as a strategic part of the business. Not doing so poses significant risks in terms of revenue and reputation loss.

The SAP product suite is expanding much more rapidly than in the past through both on-premise and cloud offerings. Patches and updates to meet changing country and industry regulatory requirements, and to tackle cybercrime are more frequent than before. Further, SAP is providing increasing amounts of customizations with respect to security, compliance, performance, and compatibility.

A well-staffed and well-trained SAP Basis team can manage this complexity and impact uptime, performance, security, and costs of operations positively. Their primary tasks, which are critical for business, include:

1. System availability — With 365x24x7 availability almost a requirement in most businesses, SAP Basis helps with monitoring by providing logs.
2. Disaster recovery — SAP Basis can run daily backups as well as help the company transition to back up in the case of a disaster.
3. System performance — To meet increasing customer expectations on performance, SAP Basis provides ways to tune the landscape to perform at peak efficiency. Administrators can also set up load balancing to scale up servers, which may be done in conjunction with cloud hyperscalers.
4. Running background jobs — SAP Basis helps in scheduling the resource-intensive background batch jobs during periods of low system usage and monitoring them for completion.

With the increasing frequency of updates and patches from SAP, the SAP Basis team also needs to plan for the right time to apply updates, ensure adequate infrastructure resources, manage transports with proper testing, and monitor the completion.

Vendors like managecore bring substantial strategic expertise in automating and finetuning the tasks through SAP Basis so that all operations goals are met. LRS Output Management enables management of output, print, and scanner systems.

Further, artificial intelligence can have a large impact on uptime. Hence, solutions in the form of AIOps enable a shift to more proactive maintenance that can predicts and prevent incidents. Watch this video by Avantra on how AIOps helps in SAP operations.