The Cloud Helpers Blog Series - Hybrid Clouds

Welcome to our new blog series, The Cloud Helpers. This series will focus on cloud computing topics and help you understand how the cloud can impact your business today and in the future. The first topic today focuses on the Hybrid Cloud.

What is the Hybrid Cloud?

A hybrid cloud is a combination of a private cloud combined with the use of public cloud services where one or several touch points exist between the environments. The goal is to combine services and data from a variety of cloud models to create a unified, automated, and well-managed computing environment.

Combining public services with private clouds and the data center as a hybrid is the new definition of corporate computing. Not all companies that use some public and some private cloud services have a hybrid cloud. Rather, a hybrid cloud is an environment where the private and public services are used together to create value.

Examples of a hybrid cloud environment:

• If a company uses a public development platform that sends data to a private cloud or a data center–based application.
• When a company leverages several SaaS (Software as a Service) applications and moves data between private or data center resources.
• When a business process is designed as a service so that it can connect with environments as though they were a single environment.

Why is the Hybrid Cloud important for your business? 
The Hybrid Cloud enables the enterprise to allocate its data, applications, and other computing resources to either its own dedicated private cloud or to third-party public cloud infrastructures. This flexibility helps organizations achieve a wide range of business goals, including efficiency, availability, reliability, security, and cost efficiency.

A hybrid cloud architecture also allows balance between the differing demands of infrastructure and business. On the one hand, because it uses technology already in place for an organization’s private cloud, a hybrid cloud environment enables technology executives to ensure that their on-premises infrastructure continues to deliver a return on investment.

On the other hand, because it leverages the public cloud, a hybrid cloud allows companies to capitalize on the many benefits the public cloud offers. These benefits often include cost efficiency, agility, mobility, and elasticity.

Want to learn more?
Continue to follow this blog for more updates. And schedule a time to speak to the experts at Approyo. The team at Approyo has migrated and managed hundreds of SAP HANA and SAP S/4HANA environments to the cloud. Schedule a complimentary assessment with the team today.

Approyo is honored to announce that it has been selected among The 10 Most Valuable SAP Solution Providers by Insights Success Magazine.

Insights Success is a platform that focuses distinctively on emerging as well as leading companies, their confrontational style of doing business and way of delivering effective and collaborative solutions to strengthen market share. This magazine talks about leaders and orators from the world of technology, which includes CEO’s, CIO’s, VP’s, Managers and other professionals who had set a benchmark in the revolution of the industry.

“Starting their own business, while knowing all the difficulties, obstacles and competition one will have to face, is the greatest challenge the brave entrepreneurs of today are accepting wholeheartedly. One such outstanding influential entrepreneur, who’s running his venture, while influencing the world is Chris Carter of Approyo.” Archana Ghule, Editor-in-Chief of Insights Success.

“We are honored to be named to this great list. We want to be the most customer-centric SAP HANA business in the world. This means our team is focused on our customers and making sure that they are achieving their goals,” said Chris Carter, CEO of Approyo.

Approyo has been providing SAP HANA solutions such as SAP S/4HANA 1610 in the cloud for the last three years. Approyo built an entire platform using the best solutions in the market, allowing clients to move SAP HANA quickly and benefit immediately without the massive upfront cost structure typically seen with those bare metal solutions.

About Insights Success
Insights Success is a forum where top leaders and executives talk and share about their experiences, views, and mantra for success which will help the young and dynamic bloodline of professionals to learn, cater and deliver business needs for customers in order to become futuristic market leaders. FAST is widely recognized as a leader of both on premise and cloud-based software solutions for the insurance industry. Insights Success has listed FAST as one of The 10 Fastest Growing Financial Solution Provider Companies based on its performance, its innovative solutions and its contribution in the changing scenario of financial market.

For more Info: www.insightssuccess.com

Transform Research and Development with SAP S/4HANA

A successful research and development (R&D) department brings new designs to life with speed and accuracy based on market, customer, and quality insights. R&D prepares the downstream departments to manufacture, sell, and service products with high quality and low cost while continuously iterating designs to create more profitable, desirable, and reliable products. Digital tools are needed for rapid design-prototype-test iterations to foster a “fail fast and fail cheap” approach. There is also pressing need to simplify the complexity in downstream processes such as manufacturing, service, and sales to execute a “lot size of one.” An intelligent, integrated, and visual product innovation platform is essential for efficient product development, faster time to market, and fundamentally better initiative success rates.

With SAP S/4HANA as the digital core, customers can iteratively and more collaboratively build a foundation of requirements-driven smart products that are brought to the market faster with full compliance and a wide range of configurations and variants. SAP S/4HANA allows companies to gain live visibility into idea pipeline, portfolio prioritization, project actuals versus budget, new product design, development history, engineering changes, and finally phase-out.

SAP S/4HANA enables companies to integrate, embed intelligence,and visualize the entire R&D process from idea, to product, to production, to service, and disposal. Connected and individualized products can be developed with full compliance and shorter time to market.

• Run design processes on live insights into customer needs and market opportunities
• Perform multilevel “what if” analyses with predictive insights to drive better design decisions
• Analyze live performance of the project portfolio with predictive insights at any stage of the innovation process
• Simplify access to project information for stakeholders and team members with the ability to drill down
• Define and analyze product costs and manage all engineering changes effectively along the lifecycle
• Create a platform as the single digital backbone of product master data for internal and external collaborations across the enterprise
• Provide connected design capabilities, integrating requirements, mechanics, electronics, software components, and simulation, as well as synchronizing all downstream product development needs internally and externally
• Manage flexible, high-performing, and ease-of-use configuration and classification for product individualization
• Integrate and validate compliance requirements in the development process and manage product declarations as part of the product properties for all variants across the product supply chain and lifecycle
• Plan and communicate resource demand to match available resources in the long and short term
• Simplify decisionmaking and processes across the enterprise for manufacturing, service,and marketing through intuitive visualization

Ideation and Concept Development

• Innovation campaigns running inside and outside the enterprise
• Repository for ideas and feedback for development-to-concept stage

Portfolio and Project Management 

• Respond quickly to customer inquiries and requirements
• Coordinate resources across a project’s lifecycle
• Use performance metrics to make informed decisions
• Support for product, service, and asset lifecycles

Product Development 

• Reuse existing components and recipes
• Do costing simulations
• Manage change-controlled structures and variants
• Hand over to manufacturing and service, with full design authoring tool integration

Compliance Management

• Design products keeping material, global, regional, and industry compliance
• Prepare quality and safety sheets for downstream use

SAP S/4HANA is The Next Generation Business Suite For A Digital World
The opportunity exists to transform business processes and achieve the digital transformation of your business with more automation and real-time visibility. Our SAP HANA and Big Data solutions address these important these needs and more. Let us show you today! Set up a free consultation.

Rethink the Possible with SAP HANA

Why SAP HANA? Capabilities include database services, advanced analytics processing, app development, data access, administration, and openness. The benefits? SAP HANA helps you manage data in a single in-memory platform – so you can take action in the moment. Accelerate the pace of innovation and run live in this new digital economy.

Database Services
Take action in the moment by using in-memory database services to process high-speed transactions and analytics. Manage large database volumes using multitenant database containers and dynamic tiering across multi-tier storage.

Analytics Processing
Gain new insights from advanced analytics processing in SAP HANA. By leveraging  in-memory data processing capabilities – text, predictive, spatial, graph, streaming, and time series – you can get answers to any business question and make smart decisions in real time.

App Development
Develop next-generation applications that combine analytics and transactions, and deploy them on any device. Take advantage of best-in-class development tools – and deliver personalized experiences with the right data served at the right time for users.

Data Access
Gain a complete and accurate view of your business by accessing data from any source – internal or external. Access data where it’s located, integrate or replicate relevant data into SAP HANA, and ensure data quality to increase confidence in decision making.

Administration
Simplify system administration and IT operations with tools that help you monitor processes, ensure data and application security, and achieve continuous availability. Keep your business running smoothly and effectively – from any device or location.

Security
Keep your communications, data storage, and application services secure with robust identity and access management controls. Rely on best-in-class software security, patching, and encryption – and use a dashboard to monitor all KPIs related to security. 

Innovation needs Digital Transformation. Approyo can help!
Don’t let the new digital world pass you by. Approyo can help your company deal with the changing world. Our SAP S/4HANA and Big Data solutions address these important questions and more. Let us show you today! Set up a free consultation.

Can you risk your career on a cloud outage?

Last week, the internet stood still for several hours as Amazon’s web servers went down. This impacted several thousand websites, companies and applications around the United States and world. Many businesses are still feeling the impact of this today.

During this outage, I was attending the SAPinsider HANA 2017 event in Orlando, Florida and talked to a number of people at the event that were impacted as it was happening. Seeing people slowly realize what was happening was a scary sight. First people realized there was some sort of outage, then they were looking for answers. After that, many realized they were losing money every minute the Amazon Server’s was down. After about 5 hours, the Amazon Web Servers ware back online to a degree, but the toll hit many companies at the event.

I talked with several CIOs at the event and the response was the same across the board. They lost  millions during the server outage. Many companies have important business applications like SAP and websites that use amazon Web Services and they were completely offline during the outage.

One CIO in particular told me it costs his organization roughly a million dollars for every 15 minutes they were down. Think about that for a minute…. This outage costs this company approximately $20 million dollars for 5 hours of outage.

Can you risk losing that much money at your business for an outage? 

This isn’t the first time that there has been a widespread outage to the cloud. In fact, Amazon has had a number of these outages over the past few years but this is the most significant outage yet.

• 5 hours… half a business day. 
• What did you lose during that time…
• What can you do in the future to make sure this never happens again… 

You need to do your homework. What does your SLA say? Is your data and applications backed up in multiple regions? These are things you need to think about when selecting a cloud provider.  You are trusting your provider with the lifeblood of your business, your data.

At Approyo we offer solutions with this in mind. Our cloud environments are built with backup in mind, so you are protected if a server goes down. In fact, we are proud to say we have yet to have an outage at Approyo. The reason is that we plan ahead and built our environments specifically for SAP HANA and SAP applications. We have solutions and failovers in place for your data in case of an emergency. We back up information and data in multiple regions, so if one region is impacted, your data and applications are moved to another region and stay running.

At the end of the day, can your career and company withstand another major outage like the one that hit last week? You can’t afford to lose millions of dollars in revenue. You need a plan and environment in place that is ready for anything.

Your business is too important to be impacted by an outage of this scale ever again. Talk to us today. We can help you and your business with our SAP and SAP HANA solutions. Schedule some time to speak one-on-one with me and the team at Approyo.  

Ask Approyo - Why Does the Database Speed Matter?

Speed is important in today’s business world. You want all the data and information from your business at your fingertips anytime, anywhere. This is where SAP S/4HANA can make the biggest impact on your company. And Approyo can get your company up and running in an SAP S/4HANA sandbox in minutes, not days with SAP S/4HANA Ignite.

The biggest business advantage of SAP S/4HANA is the simplicity of the database layout. This allows for higher data entry speed, unbelievable improvements in reporting and most importantly a complete flexibility in reporting using external hierarchies. These hierarchies can be changed any time (restructuring, acquisitions, etc) without changes to the database.
The new UI isn’t just cleaner, easier to understand and use, but completely new processes are possible because of the speed of SAP HANA. The fact that any field in a table can be used as an index adds to the simplicity and no database administrator has to be involved. This system is ready to grow again in functionality and become the backbone for the new digital world. That management meetings can now use live data to illustrate the current situation of their company’s business, that predictive analytics and simulations help to open up a window into the future in real time, is only possible because of the extreme database speed.

All bottlenecks after an assembly process finished or mass data entry are gone, batch programs become transactions, reports run in seconds and the period end closing is now completely streamlined.

Try SAP S/4HANA today
Don’t let the new digital world pass you by. Approyo can help your company deal with the changing world. Our SAP HANA and Big Data solutions address these important questions and more. Let us show you today! Set up a free consultation.

Manage your Business in Real Time with SAP S/4HANA

Manage every aspect of your business in real time.

• What if you could price a custom item, the moment the request is made?
• What if tomorrow’s weather shifted your inventory today?
• What if your suppliers told you what you needed, not the other way around?

These are not concepts from some distant future. These are actions happening today, thanks to the transformation that small and midsize companies are realizing through the use of a digital core.

The modern digital core serves as the nerve center of the enterprise. It is interconnected, agile and fast. While still retaining elements that made enterprise resource planning (ERP) critical to success, the digital core is a revitalization of that stack, allowing more external inputs and providing the information that helps yield a truly live business.

You can meet these challenges and more with SAP S/4HANA. This solution covers end-to-end processes with expertise for 25 industries, localized for 62 countries. It provides midsize or quickly growing small companies with the enterprise resource planning (ERP) software required to manage sales growth, operational efficiency, and financial agility. You can gain an integrated
view of your business, and the software can scale and adapt easily to meet your evolving business needs. SAP S/4HANA  can help you run your business more efficiently, in line with industry specific best practices and in real time.

With SAP S/4HANA, you can also benefit from smarter business innovations, faster business processes, and simpler business interactions. You can reduce your IT overhead through the efficiency of SAP HANA applications.

Leveraging SAP S/4HANA, organizations are realizing the benefits of a digital core that allow their enterprise to be:

• IMMEDIATE - Empowering business users with insights to act in the moment
• INTELLIGENT - Beyond automation, to predictive suggestion
• INTEGRATED - Not only between your departments, but connected to the world

Try SAP S/4HANA today
Don’t let the new digital world pass you by. Approyo can help your company deal with the changing world. Our SAP HANA and Big Data solutions address these important questions and more. Let us show you today! Set up a free consultation.

Tips for Choosing the Best Technology Partner - Part 2: Cloud

Picking the right technology partner can be a daunting task. You want to make sure this is the start of a long lasting successful partnership. In this new blog series, we will explore some of the top questions to address when picking a specific partner. In part 2 of our series, we will take a look at some questions to ask a potential Cloud partner. Did you miss part 1? Check out our tips for choosing an SAP Partner..

Cloud computing is becoming a normal part of everyday business. You need a cloud partner you can trust. A successful Cloud partner is determined by a number of factors, and selecting the right provider is high on the list. Here are a few important questions to ask when selecting a cloud partner?

1.    Which cloud services do you provide? Know what you are looking for. Many cloud vendors offer different solutions and services. Do you want to work with a cloud vendor that does a little of everything or a vendor that a specific focus on a service such as storage or Big Data? 

What Does Approyo offer?

Approyo is focused on Big Data with SAP. Through SAP HANA, S/4HANA and other solutions, we make big data worry-free by handling your licensing, cloud environments, backup, support and ongoing services. This enables customers to experience the benefits of digital transformation without disruption, while minimizing cost and risk.

2.    How long will it take to implement a cloud solution? It’s important to know how long it will take the provider to implement your solution. Obviously the scope of the project can impact this greatly but this is a good opportunity to review case studies and talk with other customers. You don’t want to be stuck waiting a long time to implement a project. 

What Does Approyo offer?

Approyo can have you up and running in a certified SAP HANA environment quickly, sometimes in just minutes or hours. Our cloud environments are built from the ground up for SAP HANA, S/4HANA, Hadoop and other technology solutions. Our solutions and experience allow for fast implementation and increased flexibly for customers of all shapes and sizes.

3.    Security in the Cloud – Cloud security is one of the most discussed items in the technology world today. You need to understand where the data centers are locations, what security certifications are in place and how secure the cloud is. Your data is very important to your business and you need to have full confidence that it is as secure as possible. 

What Does Approyo offer?

Security is very important to us. In fact, Approyo CEO Chris Carter was recently quoted in Talkin Cloud in an article about Cloud Security and has produced a number of videos talking about the Security. 

Our environments are certified with SAP and recently, we achieved a new certification status for the Cloud. We use tier III data center facilities with our partner, PCM. These are purpose built Tier III facilities defined by the Uptime Institute’s tiered classification system. These enterprise class hosting facilities provide security-rich, controlled environments and high availability design features for business critical applications environments that need protected against natural disasters, power outages, network issues and unauthorized access.

SSAE 16 and PCI DSS purpose built Tier III data centers adhere to strict operational standards and offers a security-rich, controlled environment designed from the ground up for high availability.

Next steps…If you have an upcoming Cloud project and need a great partner but are unsure about the options available for your business, Approyo offers in-depth, advisory meetings to help you explore the most suitable option available for your business. For more information, contact us….

Christopher Carter, Approyo CEO, Featured on Coffee Break with Game-Changers, Presented by SAP

Approyo CEO Christopher Carter participated in the January 18 edition of Coffee Break with Game-Changers, Presented by SAP. During this episode, Chris talked in-depth about technology predictions for 2017.

The buzz: Crystal ball for 2017. If #1 on your business wish list is to know what 2017 holds for your company, your industry and the world, we’ve got insightful predictions from more than 75 thought leaders about the technologies, strategies, and trends that can help you grow and compete in 2017 and beyond. Pour a cup of Joe, Earl, or Dom, and join us for SAP Game-Changers Radio 2017 Predictions – Part 5 live. Hear our complete 5-part special on-demand at Coffee Break with Game-Changers Radio.

About Coffee Break with Game-Changers, presented by SAP

Game-changing technologies are transformational, exciting and disruptive for a reason. They shake up your status quo. They get you thinking about new ways to scale, compete and grow. They move you in amazing new directions.

If you’re not already having a weekly breakfast with game-changers, join us for valuable food for thought, inspiration and information. Learn how you can become the savvy innovator who takes your company across the finish line as you look ahead to the next breakthrough strategy. Coffee Break with Game-Changers, Presented by SAP, is broadcast live every Wednesday at 8 AM Pacific Time and 11 AM Eastern Time on the VoiceAmerica Business Channel.

Are you ready for 2017! Meet with Approyo today… 
Approyo can help your company deal with the changing world. Our SAP HANA and Big Data solutions address these important questions and more. Let us show you today! Set up a free consultation.