Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2021. Read them in this 13th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
SAP in 2021: What to Expect
By Jake Echanove is SVP, Solution Architecture at Lemongrass
Public cloud adoption showed no signs of slowing down in 2020. If
anything, enterprise transition to the cloud accelerated last year, and we see this
trend continuing.
However, what enterprises will do with their SAP systems in 2021 is open
for debate. Here are a few predictions we feel confident about:
A Wave of SAP Cloud Migrations
Many IT staff found
themselves ill-equipped to support their end users during the events of 2020. A
lot of the scaling, agility, and elasticity issues the IT departments faced
could have been alleviated if they had full advantage of the cloud and its capabilities.
Migrating SAP to the cloud is not a new trend by any means, but there will be
an acceleration of "lift and shift" migrations driven by global current events.
In addition to lift and
shift, many customers will migrate from anyDB to SAP HANA in preparation for
their S/4HANA transformation. This technical migration is easier and faster than
a functional migration to S/4HANA so they may opt to do it sooner rather than
later. With either option, there is much more flexibility when the core systems
live in the cloud and 2020 really drove that reality home.
Speculation on S4HANA Implementation
The events of the day had
an interesting effect on SAP customers globally in that many enterprises found
it a requirement to cut costs by any means necessary. A large portion of
customers put some of their non-critical projects on hold. There have been
predictions in years past that 2021 would be the year of the S4 migration but now
some are saying that the current business climate may impact this. This may be
due to the cost reduction imperatives as well the fact that SAP's 2027 deadline
for non-S4 maintenance expiration is still outside of a five-year plan.
In addition, some
application leaders may be tempted to ignore SAP S/4HANA for now because understanding
its impact can be complex and difficult to articulate in terms of value and
cost. This could be the wrong approach, though, because any additional
investments made in current SAP deployments will be impacted by future adoption
of SAP S/4HANA. Business leaders should still have a strategic plan for their
SAP S4HANA implementation before making investments in their current SAP ERP
landscape to ensure they do not make the adoption of SAP S/4 Hana more complex
and possibly more costly if they wait.
A Push Towards Self-healing
SAP with AIOps
Automating IT
operations has been a hot topic for years. The massive scale of some enterprise
applications requires a level of operation automation that only cloud native
architectures can truly enable. Traditional SAP architecture is monolithic in
nature and requires a considerable amount of care and feeding. It is not
surprising that implementing AIOps in a monolithic architecture is also much
more complicated. As new tools are adopted and new APIs are exposed, AIOps for
SAP is quickly becoming a reality.
Expect automation of
operations to continue to evolve in 2021 as traditional SAP landscapes lean
towards being more self-sufficient. It will take some time to fully automate
all Day 2 activities, but the groundwork has already been laid. Expect various
flavors from simple "automate to orchestrate" to full E2E embedded
Hyper-Automate to really make traction across all layers of the stack.
Protecting the Crown Jewels
Ransomware attacks are
becoming a regular occurrence and there are many more attacks happening than
what is reported in the media. Small government entities, hospitals, and
utilities are targeted with alarming regularity. The only option some of these
organizations have when they are attacked is to pay the ransom.
SAP is the life blood
of many organizations and holds a wide range of data. This includes customer
data, partner data, PII, employee HR information, intellectual property, and
other mission critical data. Even with solid security measures in place, many organizations
have fallen victim to these nefarious activities.
In 2021, enterprises
will focus on how to recover from such attacks. Disasters will be less about
infrastructure failure and more about account compromise and ransomware
recovery. Most Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery plans today do not even
account for a ransomware attack. Look for these types of cyber recovery
solutions to make their way into Enterprise BC/DR Recovery plans.
Complex Cloud Migrations
Get More Complicated
Enabling a remote
workforce has become requirement for all organizations. As a result of this,
companies now find themselves trying to run complex migration projects with a
fully remote team. Traditionally, SAP projects require a large contingent of
onsite consultants working closely with the enterprise core team to ensure effective
communication and alignment. Consultancies will need to become competent on how
to successfully run and deliver complex projects with a fully remote group. In
addition, traveling to and from customer sites will most likely not be an
option for at least the first half of 2021. Even then, some customers may not
be comfortable having consultants in out of their offices for a longer period
of time, so remote work, on even the most complex of projects, will be more
prevalent.
SAP DevOps Goes
Mainstream
DevOps and Digital
Transformation are no longer just flashy buzzwords. We are now starting to see a
real drive and desire across global enterprises for a self-sustained framework
of accelerated and stable SAP development lifecycles. SAP enterprise customers
now want to bridge the gaps of technology and innovation to realize an
automated framework that reduces the workload and disruption significantly,
introduces and simplifies the heavy lifting, and provides a continuous stream
of stable and deployable content.
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About the Author
Jake Echanove is Senior Vice President of Solution Architecture at Lemongrass. He has experience and success assessing, migrating and managing highly complex, tightly integrated, mission-critical workloads with a focus on ERP and healthcare. Prior to Lemongrass, Echanove directed systems engineering in the Americas for Virtustream.