Staying on top of patching & maintenance in a large SAP landscape can be a daunting and exhausting task.
The BASIS team need to understand every nook & cranny of software installed in the landscape, provide a strategy for patching it, and do the patching with minimal effort and business outage.
It’s harder than you can imagine!
There are numerous tools available to help automate a lot of the process; however, there’s one aspect that still needs some grey matter applying!
Analysing the SAP security notes, reading the latest Kernel distribution notes and staying on top of software component developments is, something that is not very easily automated.
As an example: How do you determine the criticality of a bug in the Kernel in a feature that you don’t currently use, but plan to use? Or how do you decide which future version of a Kernel is most stable for you to move to?
The BASIS team need to review the information, classify it and apply the appropriate actions.
For this reason, one of my daily reading habits, is checking the “SAP Kernel: Important News” wiki page.
Endless amounts of useful information covering the whole Kernel spectrum from 721 to Kernels not even in general use yet.
You will gain useful information from understanding what Kernels are available, what doesn’t work properly and the future direction of the Kernels in current distribution.
It’s easily read on the commute into the office.
https://wiki.scn.sap.com/wiki/display/SI/SAP+Kernel:+Important+News
