The Market Reality
The COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and beyond is recognized to have significantly accelerated the shift of gravity to the cloud. Many companies are under severe budget constraints which increases the drive away from large investments towards monthly (mostly usage-related) payments. Additionally, the fast-changing environment in various industries has required the ability to quickly respond to the fluctuating market conditions by using new and advanced analytics, increasing automation and accelerating digitalization efforts. As companies rush to transform their application landscape, they can’t afford to spend much time on typical application management. Using cloud applications provides them with a significantly faster time to value and adoption of innovation without business disruption, and in a highly automated manner.
And to support these new realities, master data management solutions must also follow the trend.
“We are just starting out with master data management.”
The Agility of Starting Small in the Cloud
For companies that strive to be able to react to change in real-time, optimize operations, better understand and service customers or speed up innovations to the market, access to trusted, high quality master data has never been more important. If you are just beginning your journey in master data management, SAP Master Data Governance, cloud edition can act as an accelerant.
Master data management does not happen all at once, there must be prioritization. Focusing first on those data domains where master data quality is critical to achieving your desired business outcomes. SAP Master Data Governance, cloud edition aims to support you in taking an incremental approach to enterprise-wide master data management. As a cloud-native solution, it has a low barrier to entry and is easy to get started with. So, start small in the cloud. Our vision is to allow you to implement a single or select set of data domains and core master data management capabilities, then expand to additional data domains and capabilities at your own pace.
- Note that the first planned release of SAP Master Data Governance, cloud edition will support the Business Partner data domain, with additional domains to follow in subsequent releases.
You can also scale up or scale down processing, storage and software use licensing to meet your specific needs. And finally, as with any cloud solution, you can expect faster software innovation cycles and smoother upgrades.
“We already have an existing, on-premise master data management solution.”
The Flexibility to Move to the Cloud at Your Own Pace
Many organizations make the move towards the cloud taking a step-by-step approach. And, there are also certain industries, like banking and financial services and the public sector, that are in general moving to the cloud more slowly. This means that hybrid landscapes, consisting of applications deployed in the cloud as well as deployed on-premise, will be around some time. If you have a current implementation of SAP Master Data Governance on S/4HANA, the upcoming SAP Master Data Governance, cloud edition will provide you with a starting point on your journey to the cloud. Our vision is to support your incremental expansion to the cloud on your own desired timeline.
You can also continue to fully leverage all the investment you have made into SAP Master Data Governance on S/4HANA and chose to complement and extend that solution with additional data domains and capabilities provided in the cloud edition. You might want to cover additional business units, geographies or applications beyond S/4HANA that you have not addressed so far. Essentially, you can benefit from the same powerful capabilities of SAP Master Data Governance, with the extensibility of a cloud deployment for speed, scalability and cost-effectiveness.
And in Both Cases… Benefit from Federated Data Governance
There is also the benefit of considering a federated approach to master data governance in your organization. SAP Master Data Governance, cloud edition will be a cornerstone for a new concept called federated data governance. In a federated system set-up, the core attributes will be governed by SAP Master Data Governance, cloud edition and then syndicated across the landscape using SAP Master Data Integration. In the receiving systems, the application-specific master data attributes are then managed. Through federation of master data management capabilities, companies can achieve harmonized master data across the entire enterprise while managing application-specific aspects exactly at the place where they are best understood. Ultimately, this will support a more modular approach to master data management by balancing out centralized and de-centralized governance.
If you would like to learn more about this new paradigm, please check out the recent thought leadership paper, Optimize Master Data Management Through Federated Data Governance, and the blog, Extended portfolio and additional deployment options for SAP Master Data Governance.
Want to learn more about the SAP Master Data Governance, cloud edition?
Check out these valuable resources:
- Get a sneak peek! Check out the solution demo.
- What to see what’s coming? Go to the Roadmap Explorer.
- Want more? Visit the SAP Community.
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