What is SAP Landscape Management?

SAP Landscape Management is a software solution that is part of the SAP portfolio that is designed to help organizations plan and prioritize their SAP landscapes. According to Avantra (https://www.avantra.com/blog/sap-landscape-management-a-scalable-approach), it is a system that is designed to help organizations to know what is their SAP landscape, how complex it is, and how to plan for it.

In this post, we’ll discuss what it is, the benefits that it has, and how to use it to help you plan and prioritize your SAP landscape.

Why is SAP Landscape Difficult to Manage?

If you intend to carry out landscape management for SAP systems like SAP S/4HANA, you should expect to meet a wide array of challenges. First, the system copy is quite time-consuming because it involves myriads of steps to execute. What’s more, the solution that will completely automate this process, or at least carry out post-copy automation has to be a complex product itself.

SAP Landscape Management Operations

Luckily, there are numerous SAP landscape management tasks that offer significant automation advantages as they’re often used in the SAP environment as compared to system copies. Instances of SAP landscape management tasks include;

• Applying SAP Note implementations and verifying them
• Patching SAP HANA kernels and upgrading them
• Initiating and halting SAP systems or entire SAP landscapes when a different operations team is working on the Red Hat operating system

These operations can be quite mundane and time-consuming, but they’re easy to automate. Automation of these operations can only be beneficial when done at scale and when you effectively deploy a simple SAP management solution. Otherwise, you may realize that the cost of running an SAP landscape management software far outweighs the benefits you receive from automation.

SAP Landscape Management for Managed Service Providers (MSPs)

Managed Service Providers (MSPs) often experience one key challenge – each solution that supports landscape management or automation at scale needs to also support multi-tenancy. This is the only way that MSPs can uphold the integrity and security demands of their clients without using too much effort.

What are Cloud and VMware?

The digital transformation that is being experienced around the world currently means that more businesses and corporations are shifting their SAP environments to the cloud. Notable examples of these cloud services include Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

Besides the cloud, numerous on-premise environments still host SAP applications, and their customers depend on SAP landscape virtualization tools. VMware products – a hybrid solution for its customers – are among these SAP landscape virtualization tools. When it comes to SAP landscape management, it’s beneficial for both SAP and non-SAP systems to consider using these virtualization environments.

For example, if you stop working on your SAP systems beyond normal business hours to save on cloud costs, it can only be advantageous if you also stop the virtual machine or cloud server hosting the SAP systems. Instead, you want this to be a key part of your automation workflow to minimize time wastage.

Automating Your SAP Landscape Management

Essentially, the key to succeeding in landscape management is automation, and automation is an incremental procedure. You can begin by automating the mundane operations that are less critical. To make the most out of automation, you need to allow the development team to start and stop their SAP software solutions without the need for the SAP Basis team.

If you’re a Managed Service Provider (MSP), you can inform your clients to do so safely and soundly. This means that your management solution ought to be simple to use and smart.

In your automation journey, the next step is to upgrade the kernels of your SAP HANA databases and production SAP systems. Here, you want to make sure that everything takes place automatically so you can focus on other tasks and operations.

And there will be another step and another one; and eventually, you’ll realize that you’ve grown into automation. When choosing a vendor, ensure that the vendor will support your growth and grows with you!