Cloud TDM™: Leverage SAP BTP to drive your test data automation, and optimize RISE consumption

When you move to RISE, your S/4HANA system is in a hyperscaler and there is a certain appliance size for the Production system. When you copy that system back for testing to a QA environment, you need the same size appliance. As the Production system, grows the appliance size will go up; and then when you copy back to test systems, you need the same size appliance there, so the consumption costs go up quite dramatically as the system grows. With Cloud TDM, you can actually take a subset of data from Production in order to refresh your testing environments. So that could be a twelve-month time slice of transactional data with master data, or it could be filtering on specific company codes for testing that will cover enough of the testing requirements. Let's take a look at how this actually works. So here's my BTP App for Cloud TDM, and I can come into create a client sync, pick the source system - in this case it's my Production S/4HANA system - and then I can choose the profile with which I want to copy the data back. So do I need transactional data? If so it'll come with master data and customizing, and I can apply this time slice. So do I want the previous month? Do I want the previous year? Do I have a specific date that I want to pick? Sometimes, I might just need master data. So particularly if I was doing a dedicated client for automated testing, I might only need master data when customizing for the test automation to then go and create those transactions. We can decide whether to include users and authorizations, and there's some high-level exclusions that we can make. Built into Cloud TDM is the ability to anonymize data. So I can pick from a policy that's configured in order to randomly scramble data for multiple different data types. Here we can see for example on the business partner, we've got particular rules set which includes scrambling bank details, business partner names, and you have options for how that anonymization will take place. We then come through to the execution options. So I can give my sync a name,'Transactional data with scrambling'. And we then determine are we going directly to the target system via an RFC, or are we sending data to a file, which will then go and import into the target system, or do we just want to do an estimation to see how much data would be picked up? What would be the size of our target client? We then choose the route that we're going to be sending the data through and then we can choose the number of processes. So this will control how quickly the run will actually happen, and we can schedule it to occur at a particular time in the future, and in some cases you may even want to make it periodic. We can also have notifications, so when the sync starts, when it finishes, maybe an update every hour telling me what the progress has been. In terms of the layout and the topology of this, the Cloud TDM is a BTP app which is running in Cloud Foundry and uses some SAP services within BTP. So the authorization trust management service, that's how we're logging on into Cloud TDM, and then it's using the SAP destination service and the connectivity service to reach the S/4HANA system, whether that's on-premise or in hyperscaler as part of RISE. And that's where it's actually executing the transfer of data.

Irrespective of the size of your SAP estate, data quality in your SAP non-production systems can get outdated quickly. Leveraging SAP system copies is time consuming, requires hardware on a par with Production, and means considerable business downtime. Having reliable test data in your non-production systems is critical for testing, support and training, and to support agile development.

More companies are moving to SAP S/4HANA, and moving workloads to the cloud, demanding lean and secure test systems to reduce disk space and optimize costs. Companies also face the complexities of managing data security, and compliance with data privacy regulations like GDPR, so need best-practice strategies to manage sensitive data and reduce business risk.

The solution: Cloud TDM

Cloud TDM, the latest innovation from EPI-USE Labs, allows you to leverage SAP BTP in your test data management processes. Leveraging the SAP Authorization and Trust Management Service, along with the SAP Destination Service and SAP Connectivity Service, the BTP app connects into the SAP Cloud Connector from where it can reach the SAP systems to instigate the export or import of data.

The client slice allows for the latest customizing and master data to be provisioned, along with a time-slice of transactional data – such as the last three months. This provides the perfect test client with less disruption to refresh, and dramatically reduces the appliance costs in non-production.

As the organization grows and needs larger hardware for Production, the test environments can stay lean and keep costs down. There is also the option for built-in anonymization for the scrambling of sensitive data to ensure that no real data is at risk during testing, and compliance with SAP’s data processing agreement.

You need to be able to get the right test data into the right place at the right time. With Cloud TDM, we're allowing people to make sure that before they go into RISE or as part of a migration to RISE, they are having the leanest possible non-production environments. GROW and RISE are the main strategies that SAP are talking to their accounts about. And for the latter, test data management is crucial and effective landscape management is crucial. Knowledge of the SAP data model is what EPI-USE Labs have been building for the last twenty plus years, and that allows us to be able to provision much more effective test environments. We can build out test systems that have perhaps just master data and customizing, or it could be a time slice of transactions so they can stay in smaller appliances for their non-production systems. Traditionally, the challenge for SAP organizations with their test data management was the integration between different areas. But now in the hybrid world, where you also have integration to SAP cloud solutions, there is a need to balance the data and have the right amount of data in your test environment, but to actually have it updated in line with those cloud systems. They all need to have matching data in the S/4 world, but potentially not all of your test environments have a linked cloud system. The challenge then, of course, is making sure that any anonymization of test data happens consistently between those different systems. Security and compliance are critical to all organizations now because the number of laws that organizations need to comply with is going up really quite rapidly. And that's where Cloud TDM can ensure correct scrambling is happening across the board. We want to see what are the next big rocks that organizations are pushing up against and see how we can help that with our technology.