UNDP’s commitment to UNICC’s on-premises hosted and managed ERP service attests to the quality of service and technological viability of this hosted ERP solution today.
UNDP has hosted its Oracle PeopleSoft Atlas ERP at UNICC for a decade and has just renewed its managed service with UNICC. UNDP, UN Women, UN Volunteers, UNCDF, UNITAR, UN System Staff College, United Nations University and UNFPA all take advantage of this service, including more than 30,000 users in HQ and country offices around the world.
UNDP is bound to maximise its return on investment in ERP systems and support, by working with a trusted partner who provides value for money, efficiency, expertise at every step of the way. We are pleased to renew our decade-long relationship with UNICC and look forward to continuing to optimise the system with new technology and the most trusted service support.
Paul Raines, OIC, CTO, Office of Information Management and Technology, UNDP
Atlas ensures strengthened usability, data control and harmonization, improved finance, procurement, human resources, and travel, public cloud readiness, and extended functions in reporting, external access, and project management. Towards the end of its last five-year contract with UNICC, UNDP went through a business and technical assessment and cost-benefit analysis on remaining with UNICC or moving in a new direction. UNDP considered several options – and, like many other Agencies, they considered a journey to the public cloud.
UNICC to maintain high business value for UNDP’s Atlas, a unified solution:
• Improved business insight
• Lower operational costs
• Enhanced collaboration
• High performance rate
• Improved efficiency
• Consistent infrastructure
• High user-adoption rates
• Reduced risk
• Lower management and operational costs.
Background
UNDP set out in the early aughts (2002-2003) to build and maintain a global ERP system, replacing hundreds of local and regional systems that managed HR, finance and accounting, procurement and other key core business activities into a single and integrated system with high-quality data visibility. With an integrated technology platform, UNDP achieved accountability and transparency of its core business processes. By 2009, UNDP had migrated their ERP – the largest and most complex ERP in the UN system – from IBM to UNICC with a cost-effective and flexible infrastructure capable of sustaining and growing UNDP and Partner Agency business needs. The new environment at UNICC supported data and business-process volume increases, consolidating all Atlas applications at a single data centre, with adequate capacity to address the needs of a growing Atlas user base. Five years out, Atlas went through a hardware refresh (and renewal of the contract), including server virtualization, performance optimisation and other enhancements in a greening data centre.
UNDP’s ERP landscape today
Towards the end of its last five-year contract with UNICC, UNDP went through a business and technical assessment and cost-benefit analysis on remaining with UNICC or moving in a new direction. UNDP considered several options – and, like many other Agencies, they considered a journey to the public cloud.
With a highly complex infrastructure and detailed business processed, requirements for data privacy, a highly multifaceted ERP platform and database, a (low) maturity level for public cloud ERP solutions and a high level of trust in UNICC, UNDP chose to renew its contract for another six years, with a migration and hardware refresh to introduce the newest of Oracle’s technology.
Refresh and migration of hardware infrastructure
Key to the new services and support is to refresh the hardware infrastructure using the new Oracle Exadata platform. This platform achieves higher performance and availability at lower costs by moving database algorithms and intelligence into storage and networking, bypassing traditional processing layers. Exadata also increases staff productivity, improves resource utilization for database workloads and reduces downtime by up to 94 percent. The new agreement between UNDP and UNICC is for the migration, hardware refresh, managed hosting and service management. This includes environmental control and monitoring, physical security, hardware provisioning and refresh, managed storage and backup services, installation, configuration, maintenance and support of hosted equipment and operating system.
It also allows for 24/7 service monitoring with provision of server tools for monitoring, security and anti-virus, application of system patches, service packs, hot-fixes for operating systems and standard monitoring/security software, event and log-file management.
In addition this includes performance base lining and availability monitoring, anti-virus updates and monitoring, backup monitoring, 24/7 incident support and network access to services hosted in UNICC-managed facilities.
UNDP Atlas ERP infrastructure schematic UNICC will provision, install, configure and test the infrastructure – servers and storage. UNICC will also configure and test interactions with existing networks and firewalls. UNICC will migrate all Atlas applications to the new infrastructure in a phased approach (first the non-production databases, non-production web/app tiers, then the DR databases and DR web/app tiers and finally the Production databases and Production web/app tiers. This upgrade will reinforce the security of the platform with data-at-rest encryption.
Indeed, since last September, UNDP has ask to buy a security pack called Transparent Data Encryption (TDE). Below the description as provided by Oracle:Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) stops would-be attackers from bypassing the database and reading sensitive information directly from storage by enforcing data-at-rest encryption in the database layer.
UNDP’s commitment to UNICC’s on-premises hosted and managed ERP service attests to the quality of service and technological viability of this hosted ERP solution today. Despite the many options that an organization has today across public and private sectors – on premise, hybrid or public cloud – UNICC’s platform and services remain UNDP’s solution of choice – and UNICC the trusted service provider they count on.
