SAP’s products, technology and development are rapidly changing. Once focused on on premise applications, SAP’s focus on rapid innovation in cloud technologies brings exciting, transformative change to your business. But it has also upended the way these new business critical applications need to be supported and administered.
It’s not just the cloud that’s bringing change to your technology stack. Upgrades to trusted on premise systems bring new programming languages, new extension development techniques and new integrations to other non-SAP technology stacks that now run business critical processes - especially as your business embarks on the upgrade from ECC 6.0 to S/4HANA.
Change doesn’t always come from new products and innovations in your landscape though. We’re seeing an increasing rise in cyber attacks and ransomware incidents. When new attack vectors and new best practices to mitigate these ever evolving threats appear, operations need to ensure that these practices are swiftly rolled out to your landscape to protect your business applications.
At Avantra we’ve built an incredibly flexible platform that allows our customers to evolve their operations quickly to respond to these changes. Just recently I heard that one of our large customers had used our JavaScript based custom checks to roll out custom detection for specific affected versions of a piece of software after a new critical vulnerability was found and was being actively exploited in the wild. This allowed them to quickly focus on the systems that needed their attention rather than conducting a manual inventory, or worse, not being able to do anything due to the amount of effort that a manual inventory would take.
When you have more than 1000 servers, keeping on top of what’s on each and every one of them is more than a full time job. You’d be hard pressed to find anyone that can list each and every software component, and their dependencies installed on even one server. And it only takes that one server to be vulnerable to potentially cause havoc on your landscape. The time from knowing about a vulnerability, to knowing if it impacts your landscape is critical. With Avantra 21.11, we’ve worked hard to ensure that creating new custom checks is as easy as possible so you can roll out new checks quickly and know the impact right away.
We’ve started by adding a new “Test execute” button that allows check developers to immediately execute their code and get immediate feedback. We’ve loved using this feature internally as it’s completely changed the way we write our custom checks.
With Avantra 21.11, we’ve added new APIs around calling SAP code (RFCs) and web services from checks and automations. We’ve also greatly improved our documentation resources. These new, simple APIs, make JavaScript based custom checks do cleverer things with much less code, allowing developers to build more innovative solutions faster.
Since the time from code to test is greatly reduced, it’s much easier for developers to write fully tested code and quicker to roll these out across your landscape. And with our new documentation, we’re lowering the barrier to create these custom extensions by providing walkthroughs and code samples that can be adapted for your Avantra.
We’re not going to stop here and have some great themes on the roadmap to ensure Avantra platform is always focused on maintaining what’s important to your business.
If you’re looking for more information on Custom Extensions on Avantra, take a look at our Brighttalk session, technical review of the changes in 21.11 or our API documentation.