Johannesburg, 31 Jul 2012
ContinuitySA, the leading African business continuity provider, and Britehouse are jointly offering a solution for managing the performance of SAP systems combined with disaster recovery services. Britehouse, a member of the Dimension Data group, is a business process automation and application platform specialist company. Britehouse is the first and only Partner in Africa that is SAP Certified in Cloud Services and an advanced partner in SAP Hosting Services.
The new offering, which has been certified by SAP AG, allows customers to reduce risk and outsource specialist critical services necessary to manage SAP systems administration and related services.
ContinuitySA will be providing the infrastructure, connectivity and workplace recovery elements of the offering out of its multiple data centres across Africa.
“The move towards virtualisation means we can offer clients virtual resources on demand, which in turn supports this type of specialised, service-based offering,” says Justin Lord, general manager, Hosting Services, ContinuitySA. “Many of South Africa's leading companies rely on SAP, so a cutting-edge but cost-effective solution specifically designed for SAP is just what the market ordered.”
Sitting on top of the infrastructure layer, Britehouse will provide a suite of services aimed at enhancing the performance and operational management of the entire SAP stack (application, database and servers). Two options are offered.
The first option, “SAP Insight Services”, uses Syslink Xandria to offer integrated monitoring of the SAP Production (PRD) environment by Britehouse's specialist SAP Basis team. The solution will make a real-time, customisable dashboard available to clients, allowing them to monitor system performance and receive performance alerts before problems develop. The solution offering further provides detailed SAP Centric system analytics and information relevant to the stability and operational availability of your SAP systems, which includes the OS, DB and SAP workloads. SAP Insight Services provides customisable system checks and service level response information, in addition to system change management and Inventory reporting and capabilities addressing governance and risk management requirements. Without being a SAP Basis administrator, you will now know what is happening within your PRD SAP landscape, as and when things change.
“SAP Insight Services reduces the workload administration and daily Basis tasks, with monitoring policies, capacity management and custom checks in real time,” says Warren Small, a director at Britehouse. “The focus here is on preventing disasters from occurring by truly understanding what's going on in the SAP environment. Clients who take this option would then be responsible for their own disaster recovery services and business continuity, but the information from SAP Insight Services would make that process much quicker and more effective.”
The second option is a fully managed and outsourced solution, “SAP Managed Services”. In this case, the Britehouse SAP specialist DR team, in conjunction with ContinuitySA, would assume responsibility and control of the SAP environment and would perform the continuity processes and administrative functions necessary to restore the SAP instances within the ContinuitySA infrastructure.
“This option extends the value proposition to include the skilled resources needed to bring up the SAP environment quickly and safely - something that's essential given how reliant companies are on their enterprise systems,” says Small. “This is an extremely cost-effective way to achieve peace of mind: it's offered at a monthly cost with no hidden extras, it is easy to scale, and includes necessary frequent testing cycles to conform to your governance and risk management requirements.”
Small points out that by automating the monitoring process, the new offering frees in-house IT staff from performing laborious systems checks, thus making them available to perform work that adds value within the enterprise. Additionally, now these internal staff members can channel their efforts and attention to performing internal optimisation work, as the monitoring and real-time system analytics is being provided and catered for.
“This is a specialised solution aimed at the SAP environments, which is arguably the most business-critical in the company,” says ContinuitySA's Lord. “The combination of remote monitoring and analysis, plus the fully managed disaster recovery services, eliminates a primary worry for CIOs.”
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