As IT operations leaders, it’s intuitive and natural to desire fewer software products to manage an IT estate. That extends to standardizing all the operational processes to deliver significant benefits for the business.

Gartner reported that unplanned IT system downtime cost: $5,600 per minute. $300,000 per hour. IDC, on the other hand, estimates that system outages can cost a company between $500,000 to $1 million or more per hour. (“DevOps and the Cost of Downtime: Fortune 1000 Best Practice Metrics Quantified”) With more than 345,000 customers in more than 180 countries and 15,000 partnering companies globally, SAP is the world’s third largest independent software manufacturer.

Included with Avantra Enterprise edition, Avantra Add ins are pre-packaged best practice scenarios that accelerate your business time to value using our expertise. One such Add in is SUSE hardening and is based on the hardening guide from the makers of SUSE Enterprise Linux. This Add in is a collection of eight custom checks that are designed to be extensible by you to match your organizational requirements.

SAP applications drive the most business-critical processes in companies around the globe. It will not surprise anyone that cybersecurity is of utmost importance to prevent SAP customers from vulnerabilities. A joint threat-intelligence report from SAP and Onapsis, released on 6 April 2021, warns that cyber attackers are actively exploiting known SAP security vulnerabilities to steal information and compromise mission-critical SAP landscapes.

One of the main development themes for the Avantra 21.11 release was making life easier. This includes using and rolling out Avantra. Our goal is to reduce the effort required on your part and let you focus on the things that are important to you and your business. As a result, Avantra 21.11 comes with a number of improvements to the onboarding process for new systems, and maintaining and updating existing ones. So, let me take you through these new improvements.

SAP operations teams are increasingly required to support new initiatives within their businesses, while keeping the lights on throughout the existing landscape. In a world where time is a scarce resource, this can be a challenging balancing act. Too often teams are far closer to losing their balance than they would like (or than the business would like to hear).

At Avantra, our customers trust us to keep their business operations based on SAP running smoothly. I have written in the past about the importance of SAP security, and how I believe that in the next few years, SAP risks becoming an attack vector for hackers. It should come as no surprise that security is an area in which Avantra has invested significantly since I became CEO.

SAP’s products, technology and development are rapidly changing. Once focused on on premise applications, SAP’s focus on rapid innovation in cloud technologies brings exciting, transformative change to your business. But it has also upended the way these new business critical applications need to be supported and administered.

What makes the Avantra platform incredibly powerful for our customers is the ability to extend the standard checks and automations available with your custom business logic. While Avantra has an opinion of the key things to monitor in your landscape, we often hear of our customers building business critical checks and automations to extend Avantra and add features to look after the things your business cares about.

SAP is one of the most business critical enterprise applications. As a result, keeping it secure is a top priority for managed service providers. In the last year SAP has notified its customers of multiple high risk vulnerabilities, through its SAP HotNews email alerts, which require urgent patching – but the challenge for MSP clients is to know “do these impact me?”