SAP operations with Google Cloud, ServiceNow and automation

A fascinating blog post covering the future of cloud operations and migrations in modern enterprises was co-authored this week by Siddhartha Agarwal, Google's Managing Director of SaaS Partnerships & ISV Center of Excellence, and ServiceNow's Brian Emerson, VP Product and IT Operations Management. In this post, Agarwal and Emerson cover the key areas that are changing as enterprises embark on this modernization journey and highlight where operations teams should be focused to make it as smooth as possible.

Google and ServiceNow also announced an enhanced strategic partnership focused on AIOps and true visibility into every aspect of your landscape. This, combined with Avantra’s co-innovation with ServiceNow (Avantra Service Graph connector for SAP also launched this week) brings real-time and comprehensive SAP landscape information into ServiceNow - a game-changer for those in this space.

There are four focus areas covered by the team:

1. Enabling real-time visibility

Agarwal and Emerson highlight a future in which “IT teams will have better visibility into and management of workloads across their entire IT estate”. For customers of platforms like Avantra, this means deep insight and integration into your SAP world, as well as your broader IT environments. 

Whether it's on-premise, in the cloud, hybrid multi-cloud (or a combination of all three), there's huge power in combining the deep IaaS integration with Google, the industry-leading ITOM & ITSM with ServiceNow and true AIOps for SAP from Avantra. This ternary combo brings exciting opportunities to dovetail your SAP world with wider business IT and processes. All in a way that simply hasn't been possible before.

ITOM, public cloud & AIOps: The power pack for SAP operations >>

2. Accelerating cloud migrations

Cloud migrations are never just “lift and shift” projects. They inevitably bring a certain amount of disruption to the business. Having detailed "always-on visibility" into your source, destination and wider business environment is crucial to ensuring a successful project and maintaining a low impact on the rest of the business.

The mix of ServiceNow CMDB enriched with detailed SAP context from Avantra and guided by Google’s RAMP (rapid assessment and migration program) is a fantastic foundation from which to truly accelerate any cloud migration program. It also sets you up for a scalable, optimized and resilient IT & SAP operations base.

For more about SAP in the public cloud, read the Cloud Challenges White Paper >>

3. Providing consistent governance across environments

Market research has highlighted the importance and challenge of ensuring that consistent security policies are applied across IT systems regardless of on-prem or in the cloud. So, by having a single platform to manage and report on this across hybrid and multi-cloud environments is absolutely essential. If Avantra is then deployed as well as ServiceNow, it allows this process to be seamless for anyone running SAP. Automatic alerts let the relevant teams know - in real-time - if there's a deviation from the approved standards or if systems are no longer secure.

Learn how to protect enterprise SAP landscapes >> 

4. Predict issues and automate resolutions with AIOps

Predicting issues for an SAP landscape is challenging for many organizations and especially so when you have systems running on-premise and in the cloud. Agarwal and Emerson emphasise that the key to driving significant improvements in this space is having a single data model (CMDB) to accelerate root cause analysis. Especially when you marry this with the ability to trigger automations for remediation results - reducing system outages for customers. This capability can be easily facilitated for SAP through Avantra's out of the box integrations with Google Cloud and ServiceNow.

To learn more about Avantra’s co-innovation and integrations with ServiceNow’s Service Graph, CMDB and Event management, get in touch through our contact page or simply book some time on my calendar.