For many organizations, the next key decision in the analytics space is how to make the move to a cloud analytics solution. As we know, there’s a wealth of supporting arguments, but also some valid concerns remain for many businesses.
How can you guarantee that your investment in SAP Analytics Cloud adds value to your organization?
How you make sure that your employees are making use of the new capabilities that the platform offers?
How do you ensure you are complying with the highest standards of security in this new paradigm?
Let’s look at how the act·in | SAC Performance Shield can help you to address and solve each of these issues and make your move to the cloud as simple and straightforward as possible.
First, let’s review the benefits. Cloud-based solutions allow you to access your data and applications over the internet, from any device, in any location. And, equally importantly, cloud-based solutions are scalable, not only technically, but also economically. Pay-as-you go-subscription models mean that as your company grows, you can expand the functionality of the system in step with your developing needs.
A perfect example of this is SAP Analytics Cloud, a truly cloud-based Software as a Service (SaaS) solution. The value proposition of this tool is clear – all your analytics in one place – from business intelligence to integrated planning and augmented analytics.
Another key advantage is that SAP Analytics Cloud allows you to empower your business users by offering self-service analytics. This means all users can create, modify, and delete content by themselves, reducing the operational and financial burden on service providers, and allowing more immediate access to data. However, effective data governance is vital to ensure that usage is consistent and rule-governed, and avoid causing havoc.
Furthermore, looking at business adoption, most companies currently have only content stored within on-premise servers. When moving to the cloud, it is key to make sure that users are correctly transitioning from the old legacy systems to the new strategic solution.
In this blog article, we will explain in detail how we solve these questions with our own solution, act·in | SAC Performance Shield, which assists with both business adoption and data governance.
How to measure user adoption
User adoption metrics should not focus only on whether the tool is used or not, they should generate insights into user engagement, revealing how the tool is used, and helping you to identify if SAP Analytics Cloud will make life easier for business users.
The most common way to analyze business adoption is via the number of users accessing the platform from different perspectives – the type of users, subscription date, etc. It is important to know the difference between daily active users and the total number of users enrolled in the tool – and it is just as important to track the hours spent using the platform as the number of users logging in each day.
All these metrics will help you to take actions in order to improve user adoption, for example, assessing the most viewed reports vs non-used ones, establishing which departments are more active in the platform, or identifying individual users who are not using it (and intervening).
How to track security standards
Deep inside the SAP Analytics Cloud value proposition are the so-called “self-service” capabilities. These allow power business users in your company to create their own reports, giving them the flexibility to visualize the data they need to meet their own requirements.
However, granting this freedom to your business users does have a limit – namely security standards. There must be established security measures so that confidential data is not shared in insecure ways or to unauthorized audiences inside your organization.
SAP Analytics Cloud allows you to create custom roles to restrict actions that users are allowed to perform, as well as restricting access to specific folders and creating Teams to group different users with the same requirements and permissions.
In SAP Analytics Cloud one of the most important metrics related to security is the number of roles, which role is assigned to each user, as well as the number of teams and who belongs to each team. With these metrics, you can quickly understand if a user has more permissions than they should.
Furthermore, a proper data governance model is not focused solely on security, but also on the way users create content. Some metrics that could help in maintaining the order and freeing up space are the number of objects by type that we have, the names of the models without dependencies that can be deleted, the number of folders, and so forth.
How we solve this: act·in | SAC Performance Shield
Let’s look at how some of this key information can be displayed and accessed within the platform.
1) Overview dashboard showing key statistics across users, objects and sessions.
2) Detailed view of sessions, displayed by time, role, and team.
3) Activity dashboard, with a granular view of failed or disallowed activities by user.
4) Security overview showing which users are assigned to each role and team, and actions taken.
5) Objects dashboard with detailed information on dependencies and how objects are distributed by team and role.
We created act·in | SAC Performance Shield, an SAP Analytics Cloud application, to help our customers measure exactly these types of scenarios and help them understand the detail within their platform, allowing them to make data-based decisions, ensure the security of their operations and keep user engagement and usage high.
Contact us for a demo and let’s discover how act·in | SAC Performance Shield can benefit your organization.