Hi. There is a question that customers love to ask,
how do I use the great analytics
in SAP Analytics Cloud on real-time data.
Cool and easy to use analytics in live data.
But how do I get there?
How do we connect our data in real time?
Glen, you're the expert. Welcome, tell us how.
Hi Jessie.
It's simple. Keep your business data where it is
on-premise
and use SAP live data connections to access it in real time.
You can do this for all of your SAP Analytics Cloud
stories, dashboards, planning and modeling.
Live data connections... Okay, tell me about them!
One big issue customers always have is data security and privacy.
In fact, many customers prefer to leave their data always on-premise
and never move it to the cloud.
So when you use live data connections
to SAP Analytics Cloud,
your data stays on-premise,
you keep full control of data privacy,
and you don't have to
move big amounts of data
from your on-premise systems
out to the cloud.
So we keep total control of our data.
That's reassuring!
Yeah! And also a lot of customers have
already invested in complex data models.
They're using BW queries, SAP HANA views.
A live data connection means
you can leverage these models and
at the same time take advantage
of SAP Analytics Cloud's
great story building experience.
And the best thing
is it's all done in real time!
Okay, so my data is secured,
I get to use existing data models
and I get to leverage tons of new analytic capabilities all in real time.
Sign me up, really? How do I get started?
Well, first you start with a project, ok?
You'll need to bring together stakeholders and experts.
You'll probably start with your SAP Analytics Cloud administrator
and data source experts.
Say for SAP BW, or S/4 HANA.
These are the people who know where
the data is and what to configure.
You'll also need security experts
for everything around data access.
Maybe other administrators
for the corporate infrastructure.
Bring all of the right people
together and you start a project.
So the important thing
is that the administrator needs to get
SAP Analytics Cloud and the back end teams like BW or S/4 HANA,
talking to each other and having a conversation.
That's it!
But see, technically though, how does this work?
How do you think we should set up these disconnections?
Our recommendation is to set up
a direct connection using what we call
Cross Origin Resource Sharing CORS for short.
Okay. You're going to have to explain that one to me!
It sounds complicated, Jessy,
but it really isn't. Let me explain.
You've got SAP Analytics Cloud running in your browser
and your view in a story.
You're getting the story page
from the cloud domain.
But just say your live data
is sitting somewhere else
in an on-premise BW system
on a different domain.
Now, your browser by
default won't let you get to
that data while you're viewing
the page on SAP Analytics Cloud.
Because this would violate something that's
called Same Origin Policy.
It's a security measure that
browsers use to stop malicious scripts on
one page from getting access
to sensitive data on another page.
And that level of security... is a good thing, right?
It is a good thing, but it also means
some work needs to be done
so that your stories can access the live data.
That's where CORS comes in.
It's a sharing mechanism that allows
restricted resources on a web page.
In this case, your data, to be requested from
another domain outside of SAP Analytics Cloud.
Another advantage using
CORS for direct connections
is that there aren't
any components or servers,
anything between
your SAP Analytics Cloud and your data.
A direct connection gives you
better performance and it's easier to set up.
You can do this for direct live connections
to SAP HANA, S/4 HANA,
BW, and your SAP universes.
So, CORS simplifies the connection process.
See, that's great.
But what if we just
simplified the whole user experience?
I don't want to have to remember
more than one login and password,
please tell me that's possible, Glen!
That's the easy part!
With SAP Analytics Cloud,
you can configure end-to-end single sign-on.
So let's say your organization is
using an existing identity provider,
something like
Microsoft Azure Active Directory.
You can configure both
SAP Analytics Cloud and
your on-premise data sources to
use that same identity provider.
That way, users will have
a single username and password.
Great! Single sign-on makes life easy
That's fine with me!
Yeah, they log on just once to
SAP Analytics Cloud and that's it!
They won't be prompted again
when they access the live data.
And there's no need to remember
multiple usernames and multiple passwords.
We just want our users' story and
data interaction to be as
easy and straightforward as possible,
then they can totally focus on creating
business value from their analytics.
Excellent! Thanks very much, Glen.
Anytime. Thanks, Jessy.
So, there you have it.
With live data connections to
SAP Analytics Cloud Your corporate data
stays on-premise and
you can use real-time data in your
stories, dashboards, planning and predictive models.
Check out the links below
for information on setting up
the live data connections
and keep coming back to see what's new
and what's been updated.
Let's connect again soon. Until then,
keep doing beautiful things SAP Analytics Cloud.