Global Pandemic, a Supersized Stress Test for any CIO Organization

The current Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has brought the entire world to a hold, at a speed which we have never experienced before, with an impact which we have never seen before. The long-term effects are hard to estimate, but for today, we must focus on the here and now. Every well run IT organization has extensive disaster preparedness plans in place, which are now undergoing a supersized stress test of crisis management and business continuity. Only, it is not a test, it is reality. 

The SAP CIO organization is the infrastructure backbone of SAP’s business continuity, and no matter what the circumstance, it is critical that we always deliver 100% systems availability and network stability. SAP employs about 100,000 employees globally. Today, more than 96% are required to work from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic. These are unprecedented numbers and requirements that we are currently managing, as our disaster preparedness plan came into action.  

How do we navigate through the COVID-19 pandemic at SAP? 

An organization of the size of SAP is obligated to have a solid disaster preparedness plan in place, it is a critical part of ensuring the trust and confidence from our employees, customers and investors. Straight forward that means we must keep all servers running at max capacity and ensure that our access gateways are not overloaded. And while no one wants their disaster preparedness plan coming to pass, it is amazing to see it successfully in action with the SAP infrastructure performing secure and stable. However, nothing is 100% perfect during a crisis. And like any other company, we are experiencing and managing unforeseen situations, such as 75,000 employees attempting to join an online broadcast within a 1-minute window, resulting in access gateways experiencing a massive traffic load with a peak of 95 Gbit/s. 

The Covid-19 pandemic impacts our employees worldwide with most SAP offices currently being closed. However, we must ensure that every employee has all necessary hardware, including access to replacements. New hardware may not always be available immediately and shipping it from the supplier to the employee directly requires new negotiations in terms of pricing and shipping options. Another obstacle is that it can take up to 8 weeks to arrive at the employee’s home, or the option is not available at all, depending on the region. Thankfully, we have a great inventory of used hardware we can fall back on and make available quickly. It required new processes for employees to submit an internal order and for us to ship it, but it is a viable solution and part of our disaster preparedness. And then there are new employees. Despite the current crisis, SAP continues to grow, and new hires need to be onboarded. We had to identify new and secure measures to facilitate the onboarding process as well. One of the challenges is that new hires have not set foot into an SAP office yet, with exception of the interview of course. Therefore, they have not been recorded through the usual IT Security processes. However, they must be supplied with all required hardware and given access to SAP’s systems and applications as well. It required us to establish safe ways to remotely authenticate each person, to be able to proceed with their onboarding. All in all, the necessary logistical planning and execution are unparalleled, and I am inspired by all colleagues who are in front of safeguarding this promise to SAP and SAP employees.

Working from home especially at times of crisis can cause feelings of isolation and uncertainty. It is incredibly important that we keep all channels open, with our customers, and internally between managers and their teams, and for peer to peer conversation and project collaboration. In support of that, we are proactively cascading information around virtual team building. In a virtual work environment, lunch meetings, grab a coffee with a colleague, or the infamous water cooler conversation are no longer available. Therefore, we provided a series of activities to our employees, with the emphasis on implementing a structure into their virtual workday. As a global company, virtual teamwork has already been part of our regular day in the office, and we have always invested and extensively leveraged collaboration and online conferencing tools. However, with the increased number of employees working from home, there has also been an increased online media coverage on security and data protection concerns around virtual collaboration platforms. As it is the case with any publicly traded company, security and data protection are not up for discussion, they are regulated. Especially with the immensely growing availability and easy access to third-party cloud applications, we have previously implemented solid measures to safeguard SAP’s security and data privacy. With these security measures set in place, I am very confident in terms of SAP’s virtual workforce enablement and protection.

In addition to focussing on our infrastructure running stable and employees being enabled during these extraordinary times, another fascinating aspect is how innovative technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) play an important role in safeguarding our business continuity. Both are powerful game changers in our industry at any time, and particularly so during the COVID-19 pandemic. Independent of our current situation, our strategy is to deliver the “Intelligent Enterprise” to our customers in the experience economy. An intelligent enterprise combines machine and human intelligence across all business functions, automating repetitive tasks and business processes to allow our workforce to focus on high-value work. The SAP Conversational AI platform is a fundamental tool leveraged for internal text-based use cases, such as support tickets or knowledgebase articles, which are processed with natural language understanding techniques. Here, AI and ML vastly support our workforce so they can completely focus on our customers during this crisis mode. AI and ML also assist us in monitoring and mitigating our current risks involving systems performance, particularly in this unprecedented situation with the majority of SAP employees working from home. 

The global COVID-19 pandemic is humbling and the biggest crisis of my generation. It is teaching me every day that even the most well-thought-out disaster preparedness plan must provide room for adjusting to and mitigating a very fluid situation. Commitment to processes, transparency and frequent communication with employees and customers, underlined by superior AI/ML technology are all major cornerstones of navigating unprecedented times successfully. I want our employees and customers to feel confident in our delivery, and to know that we are in it together. Leadership in my opinion is not exclusively realized in leading a large organization or making powerful decisions. It is especially realized in the gratitude extended towards SAP for staying strong and helping everyone withstanding this crisis.