Measuring the potential for Electronic Records Management (ERP) system failures and the quest for operational safety
In the dynamic world of information technology, downtime - or outages as they are now referred to - can pose significant challenges for businesses. These outages, whether partial or complete, can have a profound impact on a company's operations and bottom line.
Onapsis, an ERP technology and solutions provider, recognises this issue and is taking steps to help organisations mitigate these risks. The company is considering a critical change metric - vulnerability management and cybersecurity risk - and expanding their evaluation to include code development and SAP change management.
One of the primary causes of these outages is the complex nature of change management. Factors such as recent issues with importing changes, events during downgrade of applications, data, tables, and offline applications can all contribute to these problems. Despite most organisations having mature change management processes, many of these change-related problems occur due to issues with data conversion and migration.
In the past, the responsibility for resolving downtime was often transferred to internal resources or contractors under contract with the organisation. However, with the introduction of cloud-first strategies, third-party service level agreements (SLAs) have become important, and cost models have shifted from CAPEX planning to OPEX planning.
Onapsis is providing costs or valuations for outages or downtime to help organisations learn and iterate as needed. They offer assessments for testing efficiency to eliminate resource-intensive manual testing processes and for cyber risks to reduce vulnerabilities and misconfigurations in SAP and Oracle EBS applications.
Moreover, Onapsis has developed the "Assessment of Operational Stability" service. This service, created within less than two years, evaluates the stability and availability of business-critical applications without requiring software installation or access to production systems. The assessment is free, conducted remotely, and takes less than two hours to complete.
Understanding how to handle changes, risks, downtime, and outages presents new challenges for Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) and Chief Information Officers (CIOs) in the evolving ERP cloud mindset. Onapsis' new offers aim to help organisations avoid downtime more effectively, ensuring their critical applications remain online and their businesses continue to thrive.
An article published by CIO Magazine in March 2020 described 16 examples of ERP changes that resulted in organisations paying millions due to poor planning. By addressing these issues proactively, Onapsis is helping businesses avoid similar costly mistakes.
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