No doubt the past two years have been challenging for all ERP teams, this is especially true for the healthcare industry. The pandemic, in many cases, has increased the number of changes to their ERP system(s) to support the business. This, along with transitioning ERP teams from on-prem to work-from-home likely impacted the velocity at which changes could be made. Some companies may also have faced connectivity issues, increase and severity of security incidents and access to critical development tools such as on-premise version control repositories and development platforms.
For example, insufficient Internet bandwidth and connectivity issues from home to corporate network may have impacted team members productivity as well as helpdesk personnel tasked to support them. The exponential increase of endpoints may have also challenged support and opened the business to increased cyber incidents as well.
One article I read reported that their were 237 Healthcare industry breaches in 2020 making it the most vulnerable industry and it appears 2021 may be as bad if not worse. Another article reported malicious privilege access from an unknown host accounted for 74% of 2020 breaches. Again, Healthcare was one of the hardest hit industries.
ERP Systems are likely to be the target of breaches due the valuable data created, transacted, and stored in these systems. The key to mitigating the risk of breaches as well as other risks associated with ERP (i.e., unauthorized changes, unplanned downtime, non-compliance, and financial reporting) is leveraging automation.
For example, the ability to automate application changes and patches reduces the human error, time, effort, and privileged access required by those responsible for deploying changes in your ERP production environment(s). You may have already experienced a situation where a developer, for example, was working from home on his work provided laptop and lost Internet connectivity and was unable to implement an important change that impacted the business. Or, God forbid, was too sick to be able to work and no one had access to the code, configuration or file objects being worked.
These are just two of many possible scenarios which can be prevented by using a robust full featured automation solution like Stat from Quest Software. Stat supports both Oracle E-Business Suite and PeopleSoft application change management and patching. It is the most complete solution in the market for EBS and PeopleSoft.
Imagine being able to:
- Manage and track all changes and application patches
- Enforce controls and separation of duties for compliance
- Version control schema, code, file, and config changes
- Reduce effort and human error when moving changes to multiple environments
- Automate code, configuration, schema, and file object deployments and recovery capabilities
- Support tracking of environment refreshes and recovery of changes in-flight
- Perform Impact Analysis and identify how changes will impact downstream objects
- Support Application Patching in a controlled manner
- Meet Audit and Reporting requirements
Don’t just take my word for it. See it in action for yourself by registering for our upcoming live webinar Automating ERP Application Change Management Processes in Healthcare on October 19th