Data management is a significant reason for businesses adopting SAP infrastructure. SAP provides a range of applications that help businesses with their data management, not least of all SAP’s databases. Users of SAP over the years have grown accustomed to SAP’s database system. SAP S/4HANA hasn’t changed this significantly and still uses a database to manage data access and security, albeit now this database resides on the cloud instead of on-premise. SAP’s reliance on databases and its easy integration with third-party tools make it ideal for ensuring data management throughout the organization. How has SAP’s database architecture impacted businesses using their databases?

Data Management in The Time of Cloud Databases

One of SAP’s most unique innovations for enterprise-level clients is the SAP S/4HANA cloud database. The cloud database guarantees access for remote users – an innovation that enterprises took full advantage of during lockdowns worldwide. SAP S/4HANA also provides real-time analytics that tracks key performance indicators and returns usable information to decision-makers within the company. Cloud database storage also prevents one of the most significant issues with having complex data sets on-premise: siloing. Siloed data are active barriers to data sharing and can lead to gaps in analytical readouts. If the analytical engine can’t access this data, the insights it produces would be worthless – a case of garbage-in-garbage-out. Cloud databases remove this issue and even provide a framework for real-time processing of that data.

The Master Data Governance Suite

As mentioned before, the issue of siloing pervades SAP systems. For businesses that are still running legacy on-premise systems and those running cloud installations like SAP S/4HANA, SAP has provided the Master Data Governance suite. This addition to the SAP suite harmonizes and unifies their data, removing silos and bringing the data together into one unified system. SAP Master Data Governance gives its users three unique advantages:

Ø  Process Analytics: How efficient is a particular process? With SAP Master Data Governance, a business can delve into the data that underlies a strategy and determine what could make the process more efficient for the manufacturer. Additionally, quality control elements can be integrated into this analytical engine to ensure that the business’s clients always get a superior product. The result would be stronger customer relationships and better customer loyalty for the enterprise.

Ø  Central Governance: Having a single, central governance location allows a business to implement controls to data sets or analytical information. So, for example, raw data collected during or after the company recognized a problem with their systems could be discarded from the analytical set, allowing the analytics engine to give better, more accurate results.

Ø  Consolidation: Consolidated data provides the enterprise with a single source of truth that all of its connected and integrated systems can use. Consolidation also allows that data to be consumed and changed in real-time, further increasing the efficiency and accuracy of the analytics engine.

SAP’s Data Intelligence Cloud

Digital transformation has, as one of its core goals, improved how the business operates using intelligent analytics. SAP Data Intelligence Cloud offers businesses just that, along with a data management structure that experts refer to as an enterprise data fabric. The enterprise data fabric can be thought of as a collaboration of all data within the analytics engine. New data comes in and is woven into the fabric in real-time and generates insights through the engine’s constant processing.

Data Management in the Twenty-First Century

Today’s SAP data is multifaceted and comes in more formats than we can imagine. Integration between SAP and non-SAP systems is better, but enterprises still need to manage data coming from those sources properly. Data management allows SAP users to fully utilize that collected data and turn it into information through analytics. SAP Master Data Governance and SAP Data Intelligence Cloud are two methods for businesses to ensure that they utilize this data to the fullest. With third-party options for identity theft prevention and other potential hacks, companies can rest assured that their information is safe. Thus, the insights their SAP systems give them are theirs and theirs alone.