week 1 : Introduction to SAP and digital landscape
Digital Transformation and Cloud
In this module, you learned about the three main facets of digital transformation: business process, business model, and organization and cultural transformation. Digital transformation is underpinned by ERP solutions, advanced analytics, and cloud-based infrastructure. ERP solutions allow business applications to talk to each other and share a common database.
Advanced analytics empowers business leaders with data-generated insights so they can act decisively. Data analytics and data science help businesses generate insights from massive volumes of disparate data. You learned about the different data types — structured, somewhat-structured, and unstructured.
Cloud-based infrastructure enables organizations to scale as needed and rapidly change or automate workflows. Cloud computing delivers services such as data storage, security, networking, software applications, and business intelligence via the Internet on a subscription basis. The cloud can be classified based on the service models, including SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS.
It is also categorized based on private, public, and hybrid deployment models. the private cloud can be used for security-sensitive, business-critical operations like financial reporting and the public cloud for high-volume, lower-security needs such as web-based email. Many companies choose more than one approach and set up a multi-cloud environment.In simple words, they use cloud services from more than one cloud vendor.
The SAP Cloud Platform multi-cloud environment is available on four major cloud providers, allowing customers more flexibility .Businesses can choose cloud solutions based on their needs. Just like you may choose to take a bus when going to the movies with your friends but prefer driving your car when going with your date.
Data Science and Customer Experience
To develop a deep understanding of customer needs and wants, businesses must map customer journeys with their brand across all touch points. This helps businesses create a consistent, efficient, seamless, and personalized customer experience.
Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Automation
Businesses can use AI for process automation at all stages to become more efficient and adapt to change. AI mimics human intelligence to perform tasks.It relies on explicit knowledge that is fed into it and implicit knowledge that it gathers from experience. Businesses can use AI for process automation at all stages to become more efficient and adapt to change.SAP has designed guiding principles to steer the development and deployment of AI software.
Security and Privacy
Information security is the realization that data has value, it can be owned or managed, and it is possible to lose data instantly. While information security is a very broad topic, some elements are common to all forms of information security. These are risk management, cyber security, and data resiliency. Risk management is the likelihood of data being stolen because of poor security procedures and the risk inherent to those affected by lost or stolen data. Cybersecurity deals exclusively with the practice of shielding important systems from digital attacks. On May 25, 2018, the European Union enacted the GDPR, or the General Data Protection Regulation. This regulation protects individuals from having their personal data misused without their consent. Under the GDPR, if an organization collects your personally identifiable information,they must tell you how they will use it, and process the data fairly, transparently, and lawfully.Breaching these privacy rules is not just an ethical issue; it carries legal and financial ramifications.
What do we mean by data resiliency?A secure environment is multi-layered.It can reduce or eliminate threats, respond to attacks directly, and defend itself against threats and data loss through careful system design.A robust, secure system aims to eliminate these single points of failure; the system or storage could be replicated or mirrored, and multiple backups would be available.If data is lost, it can be repopulated. Cloud systems are an exceptionally reliable way of achieving this as, typically, data resides on multiple secure storage devices spread across multiple secure locations.
week 2
Digital Transformation and Organizational Alignment
So far, we’ve seen how digital transformation can impact a customer’s technology or tools. But you’ve probably realized this is only part of the story. Digital transformation also has a big impact on a customer’s people and processes. In this module, we’ll explore how digital transformation affects organizations– and what you need to consider when you analyze a customer’s environment and design an SAP solution for them.
- First, we’ll look at what motivates customers to transform —
what is the customer’s vision and strategy?
What are their business goals?
Why does the customer want (or need) to change how they operate?
2. Next, we’ll examine the different ways an organization may be set up or structured — and how this can affect whether a customer is ready for change.
For example, if a customer’s business goal is to accelerate sales by offering online shopping, achieving this will be hard if parts of the organization are siloed and do not share information with each other. The maturity of the company’s business processes can also be a factor– for example, if sales records are currently paper-based, then introducing an online payment system will be a big shift in process for the company’s people.
new technologies play a central role in driving transformation, but so do business models, business processes, organizational culture, and receptiveness to and readiness for transformation. So, what are the key elements that companies should consider for improving readiness?
First, businesses must set clear goals. And each of the goals must be broken down into tactical goals.
Let’s say a department store wants to be the best in the retail sector based on customer responsiveness.What are some tactical goals it could set?Improving customer response time, reducing time to complete transactions, improving customer engagement, and so on.
Secondly, businesses should consider the preparedness of their organizations.Key executives should share a common vision for the company.Do the key executives clearly understand how the transformation will help the company achieve that vision?Is decision-making aligned by defining clear roles, responsibilities, and authorities?Is there a process for conflict resolution?
Thirdly, businesses must consider how to monitor progress toward their goals. Key performance indicators or KPIs attached to project elements highlight when a project is off track and by how much. They also help align everyone with clarity of purpose.
Lastly, businesses must consider the preparedness of people and skills.Have the people been brought onboard with a change management program? Do they see a clear value for them in the change? It’s crucial to know who the key supporters are. Which employees are motivated and resilient enough that they can see the process through?
Now that you know the key considerations to improve readiness for transformation let’s look at some early steps companies can take.
First, businesses should determine their starting point by auditing existing systems and assets.Which machines are already digitalized?Is the ERP modern and scalable, or is it still running on disk-based database memory?The easiest way is to first look for processes within the business that are high operational priorities with the least complicated path to transformation.
The second step is to define the priorities. The beauty of digital transformation is that it does not have to happen all at once.Like building blocks, smart technologies are designed to evolve, scale, and integrate.Businesses need to prioritize which processes to transform initially.
Thirdly, companies must build a road map.How can a great transformation road map allow for agility and growth?Companies should start with a road map that has a few strong, attainable goals. They should also build solid change management and migration strategies into the plan. As you know, digital transformation is as much a human journey as a technological one.
Lastly, companies should prepare their teams. The benefits of smart technologies can only be realized when people are on board. It’s essential to learn from their input and ideas, openly address their concerns, and give them time to change.
Business Requirements and Organizational Alignment
business requirements set the organization’s objectives. They also define how those objectives are translated into definable activities as well as definable metrics for the success of a project. These business requirements are gathered by business analysts who undertake business requirements gathering exercises based on both secondary and primary research.
First, the business requirements should be tangible, specific, and objectively verifiable.
You should be able to identify the requirement, select metrics for evaluating whether the requirements are being met, and identify a method to positively affect change in that metric.Some examples of specific metrics include expected user volume, capacity projections, storage availability, customer data, productivity capacity, transport capacity, skills availability,available finance, personnel time allocation.
Another factor to consider is sufficiency.
Is it enough to achieve the desired business requirement? Or is it part of a wider series of requirements that have to be considered as a whole to achieve change?Ultimately, the purpose of a project is to create business value.And the degree to which it does is defined by how well it meets those business and project requirements.
Strategic, operational, and cultural maturity levels are key elements to consider in determining an organization’s readiness for change. There are many models of organizational maturity.
There are many models of organizational maturity.And quite a few of them feature five stages of business maturity.
how do you think the maturity stages affect the readiness of an organization?
A first-stage company may be interested in moving to the second stage, which would entail placing structure and data management in place.
A second-stage company may be primarily interested in moving to the third stage.This would mean discovering how best to use data and incorporate it into strategic decision-making.
A fifth-stage company may be interested in becoming more flexible.It may also seek to undertake more complex changes to adapt to what it perceives as a new competitive threat from new technology or environmental policy.
What does this imply for you as a consultant?
It means you need to consider the organization’s maturity and its impact on its readiness for change.
week 3:Introduction to System Design and Development
architecture: A system’s architecture is a conceptual model that specifies a system’s structure and behavior.
A system could be software, a business process, an app, or a website, among other things. The structure includes the system’s overall design, its different components, the hardware and software technologies, the connections to other systems, and the usability and user experience of the system.The behavior includes the actors that engage with a system, their operations, and their interactions with the system. Actors are system users — these could be people, other organizations, and other systems.
In system architecture, the core is enterprise resource planning (ERP.)The ERP system is a business’s central data platform that integrates all the core business processes needed to run a company, such as finance, human resources, manufacturing, supply chain, procurement, and others. It captures all the key data from other connected systems and performs more complex functions such as business intelligence, customer relationship management, supply chain management, and so on.
Architectural Design Methods:conceptual, logical, and physical data models
One way of looking at a system’s overall architectural plan is by looking at where data resides in a system and the flow of data between and across connected systems. This is known as data modeling. Data modeling is the visual representation of an enterprise’s data elements and their connections. When creating a new system, a designer starts with a diagram showing data flow into and out of the system. Designers also define the data formats, structures, and how the data flow requirements will be met. Three traditional ways of looking at data models help us understand complex systems: conceptual, logical, and physical.
A conceptual data model is like the big picture model that represents the overall structure and content but not the detail of the data plan. It is the typical starting point for data modeling — identifying the data sets and data flow through the organization. It serves as a high-level blueprint for developing logical and physical models. A conceptual data model is a basic pattern of entities and relationships.
A logical data model is an expansion of the conceptual model.
Physical data model, which is the technical design of the system’s architecture. Like the logical data model, a physical model visually represents the entities and their relationships.
The conceptual model helps you lay out the components and functions of the data model.The logical data model defines the data flows and how data will be acquired,stored, and distributed.And the logical data model drives the physical data model that guides the creation of the database and the application or system.
Cloud architecture serves as the blueprint that provides a high-level overview of a system’s components, subcomponents, connections, and interactions.Systems design is the process that provides structure — a detailed plan, if you will,describing the interactive components and subcomponents within the domain designed to solve a problem.
There are three major cloud architecture models:Saas,Paas,Iaas.
There are four main types of cloud computing:
Hybrid clouds are a mix of public and private resources; data is typically stored in a private data center.
Multi-clouds are a mix of more than one cloud service from more than one vendor (may include public and private); data is stored in multiple locations.
Private clouds are privately owned computing resources that store all data in a private data center.
Public clouds are publicly shared computing resources with no privately owned space for data storage.
The main difference between hybrid and multi-cloud is the location of the non-cloud resources.Hybrid clouds usually use on-premises infrastructure like servers, databases, and so on, whereas those resources may be hosted in another vendor’s cloud in the multi-cloud environment.
Designing for the cloud follows a methodology called the 12-factor application.The 12-factor application is a set of principles and guidelines for developing scalable, performant,independent, and resilient cloud-optimized applications.The 12-factor methodology principles, which align with the microservice principles, include
codebase, dependencies, config, backing services, build, release, run,processes, port binding, concurrency, disposability, dev/prod parity, logs, and admin processes.
Microservices architecture is based on developing an application as a collection of small services designed and deployed independently, or self-contained.
Self-contained packages have their own data store, dependencies, and programming platforms and communicate with each other using APIs or messaging.
Each microservice resides within a container.
Containers are units of software in which the code, application libraries, and dependencies are packaged together so they can run independently.
Docker, for example, is a container tool for deploying software.It can run on any platform via a Docker engine.Several methodologies, including DevOps and Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery,are popular deployment automation options for rapidly building, testing, and releasing software.
cloud security encompasses protocols and best practices for securing data and applications in the cloud, network security, identity and access management, business continuity planning, and legal compliance. Database service built and accessed through a cloud platform is called a cloud database. These databases can be managed by users or providers depending on implementation. Cloud databases provide easy access, scalability, and disaster recovery. The networking infrastructure is virtualized and is provided programmatically via APIs,or application process interfaces, in the cloud.
What do you get when you combine the hardware and operating system?A platform!There are primarily five types of platforms.
First, a computer platform is a system that consists of a hardware device and an operating system that an application runs on.
Second, an application can also be a platform if it is a base for other programs.For example, a relational database management system, or RDBMS, is an application that stores, manages, and retrieves business data stored in a relational database. RDBMSs communicate with customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.Since RDBMSs are applications that serve as a base for other programs,they also function as platforms.
Third, some browsers are also referred to as platforms now. These browsers serve as a base for running other applications’ software programs. For example, Chrome OS is a lightweight OS that powers Chromebooks.
And lastly, platform as a service, or Paas, is also a type of platform
an operating system is a program that acts as an interface between computer hardware components, the applications, and the user.The hardware and the operating system together make a platform.The platform conforms to standards that enable software developers to develop software applications for the platform. Software can be single-platform, cross-platform, or platform-agnostic.
database
A database is an organized collection of structured data — usually electronically stored for retrieval and management.
Analytical data combines transactional data and master data to provide business intelligence and analytics for organizational decision-making.
Hierarchical databases are those in which data is organized and stored in a tree-like(or parent-child) structure. Each parent can have multiple children, but children can have only one parent. This model is not flexible, and data can only be retrieved by starting with the parent and moving through the branches.
Object-oriented databases represent and store data in the form of objects and classes.Object-oriented databases work with an object-oriented programming language and are quite complex.
relational databases are those in which the data is organized into predefined, logical,and easy-to-identify relationships and stored in columns and rows.
NoSQL or non-relational databases allow storing a wide variety of data in different formats.NoSQL databases also prioritize availability over consistency and allow you to work with various data structures within a database.
Cloud databases are accessible from anywhere with Internet access and a web browser.Cloud solution users don’t necessarily have to be highly trained database administrators to query data and perform analyses.
Multi-model databases, according to SAP, are single, integrated data platforms that can store, access, and process different data types to perform multiple tasks.
With a multi-model database, you can unify various data types and models into a single solution without having individual technologies for each specific purpose.
Elastic Computing
Elastic computing is the ability to quickly increase or decrease computing capacity to
meet changing demands.
These computing resources include computer processing, memory, and storage.
Companies can use elastic computing without worrying about capacity planning and engineering for peak usage. Computing can scale horizontally and vertically. Horizontal scaling means increasing the computing capacity by adding more machines. In vertical scaling, computing capacity is increased by adding more power to current machines.It may mean upgrading the CPUs, memory, storage, or network speed.
Elastic computing is a feature of many SAP solutions as well.
For example, during the deployment of SAP HANA Cloud, customers can choose the computing capacity, data storage such as memory and disk, and any additional cloud services that might be needed.These choices can be changed at any time.One of the most appealing aspects of SAP HANA Cloud is its compute and data storage elasticity.Customers can quickly increase or decrease their computing and data storage using a simple interface.The benefits of elastic computing include flexibility, lower costs, efficiency, and agility.
Applications and APIs
An API functions much like a messenger.Perhaps think of a rider on horseback who carries instructions to a commander on the battlefield.
In the context of an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, data is structured and stored in a database. To interact with this data, APIs are programmed to allow specific actions on the data.The APIs connect applications, data, and services. A commonly used type of API is a representational state transfer (REST) API.For any client (in this case, the company’s website) to be able to call the API, it requires using standard protocols, and REST conforms to these rules.REST provides a mechanism for the client and the web service to agree on the data format to exchange.
There are specific tasks that developers want the API to do.For example, the API gateway acts as a gatekeeper for APIs by enforcing security policies. The API repository allows developers to keep APIs in a store or catalog.API analytics allows developers to monitor API usage, load, transaction logs, historical data, and other metrics that provide information on the success of the API.
Companies frequently use APIs to enable existing software to communicate with new software they adopt. Suppose a company uses existing software to store information about their customers, and users of the new software need to be able to access this data. These kinds of changes frequently happen as businesses change and update their systems. An API could be used as the messenger between the existing software and new software.
Programming Languages and Development Tools
As we wrap up, it is noteworthy to recall that many programming languages and development tools exist.Not all languages or tools are meant to perform the same functions or create or develop the same types of programming projects.
Designing Customer Experience and Data Science Elements
data science is the process of extraction, collation, quality evaluation,and mathematical modeling of data to provide a data set for analysis.Data analytics involves sifting through massive data sets to discover, interpret, and sharenew insights and knowledge.What about when you apply business analytics to business data?That’s called business analytics!
The ultimate objective of data structures and modeling is to make that information accessible to human users to form decisions and answer questions pertinent to business growth.ut how will a business know that it’s asking the right questions?
That’s where design thinking can help!
Propounded by the design firm IDEO, the framework follows six phases in an iterative, human-centric process.
First, empathize by developing an understanding of the end user.Second, define the problem by combining all the research and observing where the user’sproblem exists.Third, ideate by generating a wide range of ideas.Fourth, prototype by building real, tactile representations of the idea.Fifth, test the prototype and return it to the user for feedback.The last step is to implement the idea.
companies can use business analytics software to monitor and optimize every aspect of their operations.
at the top level,SAP’s design methodology considers customer experience from five angles:
Customer relationship management.
Customer data.
Service ticket intelligence.
Customer journey mapping.
The user interface and user experience, often referred to as UI/UX.
Human-centered design sits at the heart of all customer and user experiences.To get a deeper insight, project teams often conduct empathy-mapping exercises.This involves running workshops with different user types to hear directly about their experiences.Empathy mapping is a collaborative process that creates a shared understanding of user needs.
As an SAP consultant, you have to remember that a user’s experience is not limited to just one section of a process; it’s shaped by the whole customer journey.To optimize your solution design, you need to capture and access detailed customer experience data through enterprise customer-experience management solutions such as Qualtrics.By doing this, you gain valuable customer insights that are linked to the internal business processes, IT systems, and organizational units associated with your solution.
cloud
In cloud-native applications, each component is designed as an independent service.These independent services are called microservices.So, in the travel portal example, this would mean building the travel portalas a collection of microservices: flight, hotel, and car bookings.While the customer experiences the portal as one website,the resources for each service are managed independently.
The SAP Business Technology Platform, Cloud Foundry environment is an open platform as a service that lets organizations develop microservices and cloud-native applications.These microservices can be developed, deployed, and maintained individually.Each microservice can be handled independently without disrupting the end-user experience.A microservice can be scaled up and down as per the demands on that service.And how do these microservices communicate with each other?Through the service mesh!
A service mesh enables a web of microservices to communicate with each other while optimizing how each of them works together.why companies prefer cloud-native applications:
First, they are flexible and allow for continuous improvement.This facilitates better speed and agility for the company.
Second, the loose coupling of microservices builds better resilience in the applications.
Third, given that microservices are small,they are less expensive to update as more advanced technology becomes available.
SAP focuses on enabling customers to choose their provider for whichever technologies they use to run their business, while SAP manages the cloud services.And the key to this concept is RISE with SAP.
The offering enables organizations to have a single contract with SAP for their services and management requirements. RISE with SAP is also used when an organization has implemented an SAP solution in a hyperscaler environment, such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Alibaba Cloud, and Google Cloud.
RISE with SAP enables organizations to become intelligent and sustainableby simplifying digital business transformation. To facilitate consistent implementations of SAP solutions, many solutions have a corresponding implementation road map that follows the SAP Activate methodology. It defines specific phases and tasks and deliverables that need to be completed during each phase. The methodology can help businesses navigate their digital transformation journey.
security
SAP takes security seriously and has developed a robust set of best practices and applications to ensure that data is secure and only accessible to those accessing it.SAP has published a secure operations map highlighting the best practices organizationscan adopt for a secure approach to managing SAP solutions.These best practices are mapped into five layers: environment, system, application,process, and organization.
At the lowest level of the secure operations map is the environment layer.This layer focuses on the non-SAP technical infrastructure on which SAP solutions run.It comprises network, operating system, database, and client security.For example, firewalls and web application filters are included in this layer.
The second layer on the map is the system layer.The system layer serves as the foundation on which all SAP applications run.It includes security hardening, making it harder for an attacker to gain access or breach security.Secure SAP software code is also included in the system layer.As bad actors continue to devise new modes of attack and vulnerabilities to these attacksare identified, SAP continuously provides security updates for existing code to keepthe company’s systems secure.
The third layer is application.The application layer focuses on controls available in standard applications delivered by SAP and non-standard applications built by customers.It comprises protective measures regarding user access, privilege levels, and proper application design.An example is to adopt a single-sign-on capability, whereby users are authenticated once and granted uniform access to several systems within a given landscape.
Another example is secure network communication for remote function call connections to support authentic communications between systems and clients.
The fourth layer is related to processes.It deals with regulatory compliance.The objective is to have the correct application behavior regarding the policies and legal demands associated with the various jurisdictions in which SAP solutions operate.These regulations could be related to regulatory process compliance, data privacy and protection,and audit and fraud management.
The process layer includes identifying and following relevant data privacy and protection regulations, such as Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation,which requires organizations to implement mechanisms that control the proper handling of relevant personal data.
The topmost layer on the map is the organization.It focuses on the people aspect of secure operations.Here, the emphasis is on general, enterprise-wide awareness of security measures.
common types of cybersecurity threats: social engineering,malware attacks, Internet of Things attacks, and advanced persistent threats.
the five pillars for managing cyber risk: identity, protect, detect, respond, and recover.
The first pillar is to identify.A company should develop a complete understanding of its assets and the risks to them so thatit can put policies and procedures in place to manage those risks.
The second pillar is to protect. An organization should establish the appropriate safeguards to protect itself against a cyber security event.
The third pillar is to detect. A company must implement measures to identify cybersecurity events, including continuous monitoring.
The fourth pillar is to respond. Once an event is detected, the organization should have a plan to respond quickly and appropriately and contain the impact.
The last pillar is to recover .Restoring capabilities and services after a cybersecurity attack is part of what makes a business resilient.
SAP TV: In Focus — Spotlight on SAP Business Technology Platform
week 4:SAP Platform and cloud
Application development can be broken into three key aspects:environment, languages, and integration with other systems.
First, the environment tells you the software’s location.The cloud computing environment is on a vendor’s server and is accessed through a web browser.On-premises software is locally installed on a business’s computers and servers.Hybrid applications have one code base that runs on multiple platforms.
Second, programming languages can be grouped according to their purpose.HTML and CSS are used for basic programming.SAP ABAP and Java are used to build core SAP applications.SAP Fiori is used to create business applications for mobile devices.It provides an easy-to-use interface with simple screens that run on any device.
Third, SAP connectors allow SAP components to communicate with other SAP systems.
Through Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), one software can communicate with other software programs. It is increasingly vital that developers consider how their work will integrate with other systems.
Finally, the best way to understand which developer skills you should build is to speak to people working on projects you think you would enjoy and ask them. A good place to start is the SAP Community page.
Beyond classical relational database capabilities, SAP HANA offers high performance,mainly due to in-memory computing technology and column-based storage.
SAP HANA offers full SQL support, plus SQLScript, an extension to Native SQL.In addition, it provides several additional capabilities, including:
Spatial data processing to gain deeper insights, identify new opportunities,and discover the root causes of complex issues.
Graph modeling to accelerate data-driven decisions and actionswith SAP’s high-performance in-memory database.
Predictive analysis to provide an automated predictive engine for non-expert scientists.
And machine learning to access an expert library designed and optimized for fast in-memory processing
Depending on customers’ needs, all these can be combined to develop Agile applications serving customers’ requirements in many business lines. This is often called multi-model development.
SAP HANA comes together with the SAP HANA Deployment Infrastructure (HDI) to make deploying applications and extensions easy. HDI is a service layer of the SAP HANA database, developed in NodeJS, which handles the creation of database artifacts in such a way that allows isolation/containerization, both during the development and operation of these applications.
HDI allows deploying multiple versions of the same application into the same SAP HANA database.HANA OnPremise, in the early ages, was still a nice product capable ofbeing a database and application server, developing applications.A later version added the all-in-one component,
which included a web development workbench allowing database and application design-time artifacts to be managed and stored in a not-so-user-friendly, now defunct, repository.Design-time artifacts are essentially a template containing a base script with predefined placeholders for objects such as tables, views, and columns.User access wasn’t role- or permission-based, so one user had all the rights.
As HANA developed, team development and lifecycle management became essential components. With the progression to the cloud, HDI provides a service that enables users to deploy database development artifacts to containers (no more clunky repository).It includes a collection of consistent design-time artifacts for all key SAP HANA platform database features that describe the target (or runtime) state of SAP HANA database artifacts, for example, tables, views, or procedures.These artifacts are modeled, staged (or uploaded), built, and deployed into SAP HANA.Access can be role- or permission-based,making it much easier for everyone to do or get what they need.As we end, it is worth noting and remembering thatthe SAP HANA technology supports the latest versions of SAP products (S/4HANA, BW/4HANA).It is the database service of choice as it supports most SAP Cloud solutions (S/4HANA Cloud, SAP Data Warehouse Cloud) since it is within the hybrid environments that SAP HANA on-premises and SAP HANA Cloud talk to each other.A nd it’s a real asset for customers because the cloud provides scalability,flexibility, elasticity, and resiliency for customers on this progressive journey.HDI is a service layer of the SAP HANA database, developed in Node.js, which handles the creation of database artifacts in such a way that allows isolation/containerization, both during the development and operation of these applications.
SAP Cloud Strategy, Architecture, and Tools
key advantages offered by cloud-based services: reliable,scalable, flexible,The pay-as-you-go model makes everything affordable .
With SAP Cloud Services, for example, resource usage is monitored, measured, and reported based on utilization, allowing business leaders to make informed decisions on where to scale up or down.down.
Cloud-based services are, by default, always up to date with the latest version of the platform, database, and software applications.
The services also include access to new and emerging technologies such as machine learning,artificial intelligence, and the Internet of Things.
PaaS, as you know, is a cloud-based application development environment that provides developers with everything they need to build, test, deploy, manage, and update apps.The service provider hosts, maintains, and updates the hardware, operating systems, middleware,databases, and other tools.The provider also installs, configures, and manages the operation of the application infrastructure.
deployment models — public, private, and hybrid
In a public cloud model, users access servers, storage, network, security, and applications over the Internet.The provider owns, manages, provisions, and maintains the infrastructure.The infrastructure is rented out to customers for a subscription charge or a usage-based fee.Public clouds offer efficiency and affordability and are often multi-tenant, which means the provider runs your services in a shared environment.
In a private cloud, services are maintained on a private network protected by a firewall.Organizations can build a private cloud within their data center or subscribe to one that a vendor hosts.In both scenarios, the organization has exclusive access to the space, meaning there is greater security and control.
A hybrid cloud is a combination of public cloud, private cloud, and on-premises infrastructure.As the name suggests, hybrid combines the best of public and private access.Hybrid clouds let you keep regulated and sensitive information in a traditional data center or private cloud while taking advantage of public cloud resources and capacity.
And the key to this concept is RISE with SAP.
RISE with SAP is a subscription-based service from SAP that combines a set of products and services.The offering enables organizations to have a single contract with SAP for their services and management requirements.It also allows them to select their infrastructure, applications, and choice of implementer.This can encompass any cloud implementation — either a pure cloud service where everything is cloud-based, or a hybrid model where some elements are in the cloud and some are installed locally and then integrated with those other elements in the cloud.The key is ease of contact, ease of management, and maximum flexibility.SAP RISE is also used when an organization has implemented an SAP solution in a hyperscaler environment, such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Alibaba Cloud, and Google Cloud.Hyperscaler environments can accommodate extreme fluctuations in demand.At the heart of SAP’s flexibility in supporting cloud services is SAP’s Business Technology Platform, or BTP.
BTP is a comprehensive, business-centric, unified platform with four pillars: Application Development, Integration, Data and Analytics, and Artificial Intelligence. BTP is fully realized for cloud services providing a wealth of cloud options for companies as they move their operations to cloud-based systems. It helps companies simplify software development connect processes and integrate data across their value chain get the best value out of their data; and drive innovation and make better decisions.
The core of SAP’s cloud architecture and its services to customers is the SAP Business Technology Platform or BTP.
Integration
allows businesses to publish and connect processes and integrate data across their value chain . SAP Integration Suite helps streamline SAP and third-party solution integrations with thousands of pre-built integrations, allowing companies to take a systemic approach toward solving common integration challenges with a proven methodology.
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