For organisations electing to stay on SAP ECC for the foreseeable future, addressing the end of mainstream support is only part of the challenge. An equally important—and often underestimated—question quickly follows: how do we maintain operational stability over the long term?
Keeping an aging ECC system stable is not just a technical problem; it is fundamentally a people problem. Over time, deep system knowledge walks out the door. Retirements, restructures, or moving onto greener pastures gradually reduce internal knowledge.
Much of this knowledge is undocumented and experiential—how issues are really resolved, which workarounds are safe, and where hidden dependencies lie. Once that expertise is gone, even routine issues can escalate into major outages, putting business continuity at risk.
Additionally, there are likely several SAP Solution Manager capabilities you will need to replace or enhance, too.
To counter this, SAP teams need a deliberate strategy to retain, replace, and ultimately de-risk operational knowledge. As experienced resources become harder to find and more expensive, automation and standardisation shift from being “nice to have” to essential.
Operational automation reduces reliance on individuals, enforces consistency, and embeds best practices directly into day-to-day operations.
Here are three key areas where operational automation can play a critical role in ensuring ECC stability beyond 2027.
1. Basis Automation
SAP Basis is the backbone of ECC operations, covering system availability, performance, transport management, background jobs, and technical housekeeping. Traditionally, many of these activities rely heavily on manual effort and deep individual expertise. When that expertise disappears, risk increases rapidly.
Basis automation replaces manual, error-prone tasks with repeatable, policy-driven processes. Activities such as:
- system health checks,
- job monitoring,
- transport management,
- database growth monitoring,
- system refresh,
- IDoc monitoring and management, and
- back-up and recovery
can be automated and continuously enforced. This not only reduces operational risk but also ensures consistent outcomes regardless of who is on call or which shift is working.
More importantly, automation captures operational knowledge and embeds it into the platform. Instead of relying on “how John always did it,” teams rely on defined rules and automated actions. This dramatically improves consistency while also freeing up scarce Basis resources to focus on higher-value work.
2. Automated Incident Management
As ECC systems age, the volume of incidents typically increases rather than decreases. Without automation, SLA’s can be hard to meet.
Automated SAP incident ticketing improves SAP incident handling by allowing users to raise incidents directly from the SAP interface, automatically capturing the technical and business context required for resolution. ITSM Tickets are created with consistent, high‑quality information, reducing reliance on user knowledge and manual follow‑up.
By standardising incident creation and routing, automation reduces delays caused by incomplete or misdirected tickets and enables support teams to begin resolution immediately. This consistency helps lower mean time to resolution and becomes increasingly important as ECC support teams shrink or rotate.
The structured capture of SAP incident data also improves transparency and auditability within the ITSM platform—an important consideration for organisations operating SAP ECC beyond mainstream support.
3. Automated Security Monitoring and Management
Security risk increases significantly in environments where core vendor support has ended. Without continuous patching and updates, ECC systems become more exposed, while security teams may lack the specialised skills needed to assess SAP-specific risks.
Automated security monitoring helps close this gap by continuously checking configurations, authorisations, and system behaviour against defined security baselines. Suspicious activity can be detected early, policy violations flagged automatically, and remediation workflows triggered without delay.
Automation also supports compliance by providing ongoing evidence rather than point-in-time checks. When auditors ask how risks are being managed in an extended ECC environment, automated controls provide a clear and defensible answer.
Next Steps
Staying on SAP ECC beyond 2027 is a viable strategy for many organisations and automation comes into play as a strategic priority. Automation is no longer just about efficiency, it is about stability, risk reduction, and independence from diminishing skill availability.
If maintaining ECC stability is a concern, now is the time to act. Why not set up a time for a free assessment and explore how automation can safeguard your ECC environment for the years ahead?
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