Benefits of operating SAP with Novis Cloud Manager

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Public cloud benefits for SAP solutions

The adoption of public clouds is a global trend, driven by huge benefits:

• Quick deployment of infrastructure and services capability.
• Flexibility to increase or decrease processing capacities adjusting to demands.
• High-availability, fault-tolerant, and disaster recover solutions.
• Protection against cyber-attacks and compliance with cyber security standards and best practices.
• Real time visibility of the infrastructure, services, and costs.

To take advantage of these benefits, operate efficiently and securely in public clouds, it is necessary to develop new ways of working.

• Code operation to automate processes and avoid human errors.
• Adoption of agile software methodologies to accelerate innovation.
• Incorporation of DevOps to control the software’s lifecycle, increase quality, and reduce errors.

All of this is more complex with SAP, since its technical architecture is not optimized for public clouds.

Novis Cloud Manager

As a result of five years’ experience operating in public clouds, we have developed a service model based on automation that aims at making the most of the cloud’s benefits. Novis Cloud Manager is part of this strategy: a software platform to automate SAP operations in public clouds with high security, agility, and efficiency standards.

Novis Cloud Manager is a multi-cloud tool that supports Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, with the following features:

Novis Cloud Manager Functionalities

 
1. Billing

This module – for internal use – automates cost calculation processes for the usage of cloud infrastructure and platforms, in addition to the corresponding Novis services, for customer billing.

• Consolidation of multiple accounts consumption.
• Cost distribution by diverse concepts (projects, cost centers, budget items, etc.).
• Reserved instances assignments.

2. Resource Management

The resource management module provides our clients with dashboards and extended functionality to manage cloud resources in analysis and cost optimization areas, resource inventories, as well as best practices and security norms analysis.

• Cost analysis dashboard
• Customizable reports
• Cloud resource inventories
• Best practices evaluations
• Resource usage evaluations
• Right-sizing recommendations
• Cost optimization recommendations

3. Security and compliance

This functionality offers our clients a security and compliance dashboard and a security management platform for internal use.

a. Security and compliance dashboard

• Centralized security logs
• Best practices monitoring
• Perimetral evaluation
• Security norms evaluation (continuous compliance)

b. Security management

• Security baseline configuration for cloud accounts
• Identity and access management
• Perimetral security and applications protection
• Data classification and encryption
• Security logs storage, protection, and analysis
• Continuous evaluation of security controls and configuration policies

4. SAP provisioning

This module provides automated provisioning of SAP solutions and the associated cloud infrastructure and services, based on the adoption of the best practices recommended by SAP and by public cloud service providers.

• Accounts creation and security baseline configuration
• Network infrastructure and base services
• Unattended SAP systems installation
• Base configuration of monitoring and backup services

5. SAP operations

This functionality automates the execution of SAP systems management and technical operation tasks in public clouds.

• Monitoring metrics configuration and management
• Alarms and events processing system
• Auto-healing
• SAP services recovery upon infrastructure failure
• Policy-based automatic disk expansion upon full volume risk
• Backup processes control and automated recoveries (scheduled backups)
• Management of operating system configuration and related services

6. Self-service catalogue

This module offers automated services for direct use by clients and Novis’ team.

• Automated management of transport orders
• SAP uploads and downloads (on-demand/scheduled)
• On-demand backup execution

Future vision

Novis Cloud Manager is a platform in continuous evolution. During 2021, we will be especially focused on the development of new self-service functionalities for our clients to provide them with further control over their platforms, gain agility and flexibility, thus maximizing the cloud’s benefits. We will keep you informed about this in future articles.

If you would like more information, please contact us.

Feedback/discussion with the author, Patricio Renner, CTO Novis, at patricio.renner@noviscorp.com