Why are we even talking about BASIS?
If you have worked with SAP for longer than a week, you know that BASIS is like the plumbing in a high-rise building: as long as it works, nobody notices, but the moment a pipe bursts - everyone comes running to you. The trouble is, in enterprise-grade environments, pipes burst more often than any CIO would like to hear.
That is why at SNOK we have spent years looking for ways to build the “SAP plumbing” once, properly, and - wherever possible - automatically. This is how SNOK BASIS Guard came to be.
What is SNOK BASIS Guard?
It is not a tool, not another plug-in, and not a single magic button. It is four complementary pillars packaged into one deployment-ready solution:
What pain points does SNOK BASIS Guard address - and what benefits will you feel?
Companies running SAP report four persistent sources of frustration:
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Perpetually backlogged security patches. Monthly SAP Security Notes pile up because testing and deploying them consumes time. Within the Guard package, this is handled by SecurityBridge - it flags critical vulnerabilities, automates testing and offers “virtual patches”, cutting the time from note publication to landscape protection from weeks down to a few hours.
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Fragmented monitoring, or looking for a needle in a pond of dashboards. A failure in the middle of the night often means jumping between ST03N transactions, an external APM tool and operating-system logs. Integrated Grafana dashboards show HANA, the application layer and infrastructure at a single glance, which - as clients report - can cut MTTR by as much as 60%.
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Manual BASIS checklists. Every day the same steps: SM21, ST22, SMQ1, running DB02 and much more. Our bot has turned this into automated scenarios; the administrator only gets a Slack-style ping when something genuinely needs attention, not when “everything is fine”. In practice, this gives the team back around 40 minutes every morning per instance.
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Production on-call and night-time alerts. Not every organisation can afford a round-the-clock SOC. SNOK BASIS Guard runs its own 24/7 BOC + SOC. Incident analysis starts within minutes, before the client even has time to assemble a team, which, according to industry benchmarks, reduces the cost of unplanned downtime by as much as a third.
The result? Instead of firefighting, the BASIS team can plan migrations, and the business stops treating SAP as a “black box” best left untouched. This is just one of the reasons why the manufacturing-sector client whose case is described below now says plainly: “Without SNOK BASIS Guard I wouldn’t go back to that job - now I have peace of mind that the system is secure, and I can see it on the dashboard.”
What benefits do you achieve by using SNOK BASIS Guard
From a board perspective, every IT project has to justify itself in numbers and strategic impact. SNOK BASIS Guard meets this requirement, because it brings together the areas CFOs, COOs, CISOs and CIOs monitor most closely: operating cost, business risk and time-to-innovation.
First, TCO reduction. Automating everyday BASIS tasks with the support of the SNOK bot reduces the need for manual work by as much as 45%. In practice, this means fewer overtime hours, lower turnover among specialised administrators and lower bills for ad-hoc service call-outs. An added benefit is a more stable maintenance budget, since most tasks move from an ad-hoc model to a predictable, fixed-fee subscription.
Second, risk mitigation. SecurityBridge cuts the time from vulnerability publication to patch deployment from weeks to a few hours. This is critical for CISOs and the board, as it narrows the exposure window - especially in production environments, where unplanned downtime means real revenue loss. Combined with Grafana monitoring and 24/7 BOC/SOC, this gives a complete detection-and-response chain: from alert through escalation to remediation, closing at an average MTTR of 30 minutes.
Third, improved availability (SLA). Thanks to Grafana’s predictive alerts, SNOK proactively catches bottlenecks (e.g. an overflowing DOKCLU table) before they become critical. In our year-long study with a manufacturing-sector client, unplanned SAP downtime shrank from 12 hours to a fraction of that.
Fourth, faster innovation. When the BASIS team is not firefighting, it can support S/4HANA conversion, Fiori and cloud integration projects. Organisations report on average 25% faster deployment of business changes, because maintenance operations are “outsourced” to SNOK. For the board, this means shorter time-to-value for new initiatives and better competitiveness in international markets.
Finally, cost and risk transparency. A central KPI dashboard (Grafana plus SOC reports) gives the board a single source of truth: in real time you can see how many incidents have been closed, how licences are being used, and where performance anomalies are appearing. This transparency makes it easier to make investment decisions - for example, whether to accelerate a RISE with SAP migration or add extra redundancy layers in AWS.
Patryk Budkowski, SAP Cybersecurity/BASIS expert at SNOK, comments: “For the C-suite, what matters most is a sense of control over risk combined with lower costs. Our package delivers both, and on top of that it frees people up to focus on delivering business strategy instead of reviewing logs.”
In summary: SNOK BASIS Guard is not just another service contract, but a risk policy you can measure in hard currency, an innovation catalyst and a mechanism that pays for itself within the first year through a combination of lower TCO, higher availability and faster time-to-value. If your organisation is facing pressure to cut costs while its appetite for change keeps growing, this is a solution that reconciles what might otherwise seem like conflicting goals.
What does this look like in practice? - the story of a manufacturing company
One of our clients, a global manufacturer and distributor, had a classic set of pain points: backlogged OSS tickets, manual transport deployments, “sudden” performance dips and an audit that found SOAP services exposed without authorisation.
After deploying SNOK BASIS Guard:
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SecurityBridge patched 92% of critical vulnerabilities within the first 48 hours (previously the average was 41 days).
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Grafana connected statistics and logs from ECC, BW and several satellite systems, showing in a single view that long-running dialogue steps in FI began precisely when the IDoc archiving job in PI was consuming I/O.
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Every day before 7:00, the bot sends a “BASIS Good Morning” report - dumps, failed jobs, RFCs offline, HANA backup status. The time an administrator needs for “daily checks” fell from 45 minutes to around 5.
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And thanks to the 24/7 BOC/SOC, two incidents (one redo log overflow, one IDS alert) were handled outside factory working hours, with no impact on production.
“It feels as if someone added a whole extra shift of people - except it’s bots and the SNOK team sitting on Teams.” - IT Manager
SNOK - passion, responsibility and vision
At SNOK we have paid particular attention for years to areas that in many organisations tend to get pushed to “later” - systematic patching, continuous monitoring and 24/7 operations. For us, these are not add-ons but the foundation of stable business growth. By combining cybersecurity, SAP technology, automation and, increasingly boldly, AI, we build services that lift the burden of day-to-day “keeping the lights on” off our clients’ shoulders and shift their teams’ attention towards innovation.
Jacek Bugajski, President of SNOK: “SNOK BASIS Guard is one of the pillars of our strategy. We want to be the partner that integrates the worlds of security, SAP, automation and artificial intelligence into a coherent, understandable package. This lets clients sleep soundly, while we help them focus on what genuinely grows the business.”
And that is precisely why we treat automation and security not as a one-off project, but as a continuous process - defined in SLAs, measured by KPIs and made transparent through dashboards that every client can see in real time.
The expert’s view
Patryk Budkowski: “Combining SecurityBridge, Grafana, our automated bot and our BOC/SOC is, from a security and maintenance perspective, a genuine multiplier. The client gains peace of mind, knowing patches are installed, systems are alive, and alerts don’t get lost in a sea of red. We, in turn, have real-time data, so we can respond earlier instead of firefighting. The benefit is shared - the client sleeps, and we don’t have to run around with a bucket.”
What next?
Would you like to see a Grafana demo on your own data? Or let our bot into SM21 and other transactions and, after a week, check how many dumps you had been missing? Get in touch.
And if you are not yet ready for the full package, start with a single pillar - SecurityBridge, for instance. SNOK BASIS Guard is modular, so we can roll out its elements one at a time.
Until next Thursday! And if you have questions sooner - find me on LinkedIn Jacek Bugajski or office@snok.ai