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Demystifying SAS platform administration and why its important for you

SAS platform administration is not the first thing that comes to your mind when talking about SAS analytics. But it should be.

While SAS analytics holds immense value for businesses, what it can do and how efficiently it does depends on the quality of administration services. Yet, a lot of organisations don’t quite realise just how important platform administration is.

In the following post, I’ll be highlighting the misunderstanding that exists around the idea of SAS platform administration.

What is SAS platform administration?

To put it in the simplest terms possible, SAS platform administration acclimatises your SAS platform into the overall IT infrastructure. People in this position often act as the bridge between the SAS platform, IT department and business users.

Platform administration refers to the installation and maintenance of the platform and ensures that it is working in sync with the IT infrastructure.

SAS administration covers a wide range of responsibilities that include testing and upgrading the platform, evaluating the software for fixes, finding disk space for permanent data, analysing results and creating documentation for the platform.

Why should it matter to business users?

Platform administration offers several benefits that affect the quality of findings. Here are just some of the advantages.

Optimising the platform

SAS platform administration is necessary because it ensures that the platform is well-optimised, making sure that issues don’t clog data collection and analysis. When administration services are not properly done, it leads to several problems that compromise the quality of findings and hurts processes.

When platform administration services are properly rendered, it leads to several business benefits, like lower operating costs, more efficient data analysis and more relevant, actionable insights.
SAS platform administrators are responsible for the overall health of the platform because they are expected to fulfil a variety of maintenance services. Without a platform administrator, it would be difficult to keep the platform in optimum condition to generate insights that would be useful to business operations.

Maintaining the platform is challenging

SAS platforms have an incredibly complex backend. While many organisations have their own IT team to maintain infrastructure, administrating a SAS platform can be a challenging endeavour without any training or experience.

An example is the use of logs. SAS generates plenty of logs, there are programming logs, remote service logs, object spawner logs, metadata server logs, pooled workspace logs and SAS stored process logs. These logs provide plenty of information on the current status of the platform.

Without the logs, it would be impossible to optimise the platform to keep business insights sharp and relevant. Knowing where the logs are, how to read the information, and how to put it to good use is a crucial part of the administration process.

SAS platform administration ensures that you can maximise the ROI of your analytics investment.

Furthermore, when SAS platform administration is conducted properly, it ensures that data is well-maintained and taken care of. This is because one of the duties of a SAS platform administrator is to generate and keep data backups. Additionally, if your IT team runs into a problem with the SAS platform, the first person they can turn to is the platform administrator, making it easier to resolve problems in quick time.

Get started with SAS administration

Given the importance of SAS administration, finding the right person who can help optimise the platform is very important. The ideal administrator is someone who not only understands the SAS platform but also someone with business knowledge and an understanding of how the organisation works.

It is important to work with administrators who not only have a lot of experience administrating SAS platforms but also understand how your businesses works. This makes it easier for the administrator to finetune the platform to meet your objectives.

Selerity has a team of administrators more than capable of providing the SAS platform administration services you.

SAS services – 4 game-changing insights you can expect

With SAS software paving the way as one of the world’s leading analytics platforms, many organisations are experiencing unprecedented benefits from the data they are collating. From strengthening visibility into employee performance to product/service movement analytics to supporting anti-fraud/AML initiatives, SAS software has streamlined organisational analytics like never before. To complement this powerful analytics platform, many organisations, and the administrators within them, are turning to SAS services as a means of further optimising their analytics.

As a leading provider of SAS services, we’ve helped many of our clients using SAS software in a multitude of ways – from SAS installation services to SAS administration services to SAS hosting services (both SAS 9.4 and SAS Viya). Our team of experts builds on the already formidable SAS platform and helps organisations make the most of their analytics. Remember, having access to a powerful data and analytics platform is only the first step. You need to know how to use this data in a manner that can drive value. That’s where SAS services come into play.

In this blog, we run through 4 incredibly game-changing insights you can expect to experience by leveraging the right SAS services provider.

SAS services give insights into your organisation’s analytics

This probably seems obvious but one of the biggest benefits of using SAS services, especially ones like our SAS administration services, is that organisations will gain insights into all the data they are now privy too – thanks to their powerful SAS software. Having too much data without knowing how to use/view it can be as useless as not having it all.

By leveraging SAS services, an organisation would be able to connect the data insights they gain via their SAS analytics platform with experts who will be able to instruct them on the best ways to funnel and use these insights. SAS services and experts will be able to identify previously unnoticed trends within your data, which could potentially drive a lot of value to an organisation. The result? Organisations will get to understand their inner workings better than ever before!

Get to know your customers better

In today’s data-driven world, customers are aware of all the marketing noise that’s out there and no longer respond to generic messaging that they once may have responded to. The most successful organisations in today’s landscape are those who are able to reach customers in ways that matter and appeal to them the most. Using data to achieve this is one of the best ways to go about this.

To make sure you’re getting the right insights, however, you’ll need the help of expert SAS services and consultants, who’d be able to show you key customer behavioural trends that will shed light into the best ways of engaging them.

Does your customer make purchases every quarter? Is there a specific product/service type they prefer? Your data, if funnelled correctly, will help you identify all this and more – allowing you to focus on specific groups while tailoring your messaging accordingly.

Fraud prevention via SAS services

Unfortunately, the more data-driven we’ve become as a society, the more vulnerable we are to external and criminal threats. Countless organisations all around the world have fallen victim to activities with criminal intent, resulting in losses reaching millions of dollars. Consequently, to combat these threats, many organisations spend an equivalent amount in adopting preventative technologies and measures. From infrastructure costs to testing and development, fraud prevention systems can be very expensive.

Fortunately, by using all that data and information flowing into your SAS environment, you’ll be able to identify suspicious activity as it is happening in real-time and prioritise your investigations accordingly. Gone are the days where you need to be reactive as opposed to proactive. Expert SAS services and consultants will provide you with the necessary direction/insights you need to successfully achieve this.

Analytics-driven insights for successful decision-making

With businesses operating in both versatile and volatile environments, the value of good decision-making cannot be overstated. Many organisations are aware of the value of data-backed decisions but one thing we see quite often is that, often times, the wrong data is used. For businesses that use SAS software, SAS services can be incredibly useful in helping them segment their customers/clients into specific groups, identify expenses and where they’re making losses, and foreseeing how future trends may play out.

Collectively, these insights can help business leaders make the right decisions that deliver the most value?

If you would like to know more about our SAS services, our company and our work with SAS, in addition to how you can leverage our SAS administration, installation, and hosting services, feel free to reach out to us or stay tuned to this feed.

SAS Administration Services – The Core Benefits

As a global analytics provider to firms and organisations all around the world, SAS software is transforming how organisations operate and do business. With an abundance of applications to choose from, organisations have a plethora of options to choose from and leverage in their analytics processes. While this is undeniably a positive thing, one of the major downsides is that the presence of so many options means that organisations now need to expand their personnel and financial bandwidth to make sure they are leveraging these insights appropriately. Organisations, both large and small in scale, will increasingly struggle to handle the increasing volumes of data – especially data leveraged through SAS software – which is why SAS administration services are so valuable.

So, why are SAS administration services so important? As the analytics space has become increasingly complex and as unprecedented amounts of data are now being made available to organisations from all parts of the world, leveraging this data the right way is becoming equally important. Failing to leverage this data appropriately and efficiently could result in organisations wasting significant amounts of time and resources – which would undoubtedly hurt the organisation’s analytics ROI in the long-term.

Organisations have two options to alleviate this. On one front, they could opt to employ a team of full-time, in-house SAS experts who are dedicated to ensuring that the SAS environments they are responsible for are installed, maintained, and regularly updated when required. The second option businesses have is to opt for consultants who have dedicated teams focused on providing various organisations with these same services. Here at Selerity, our team has provided multiple organisations with seamless SAS administration services – allowing them to leverage their analytics and insights in a manner best suited to enhance their operations.

What are the core benefits of Selerity’s SAS administration services?  

The most obvious benefit of our SAS administration services is that they instantly alleviate the burden of businesses having to focus on setting up, managing, and monitoring their SAS environments accurately and efficiently. One thing that happens quite regularly with strained in-house SAS administrators is that the systems are sometimes set up incorrectly, which results in these organisations not gaining access to the best insights. With our expert SAS administration services in place, organisations can rest assured knowing that their entire analytics environment is in the safe hands of certified service providers. Remember, in our fast-paced world of modern business, convenience and reduced burdens are priceless.

On the topic of prices and costing, our SAS administration services are actually available to our clients at just a fraction of the cost of having a full-time, in-house administrator – keep in mind that this is not including any additional in-house support staff who may be required to support an in-house administrator. What does this mean? Organisations can leverage the most up-to-date services and expertise without the added burden of having to manage and maintain full-time personnel – leverage the best and most insightful organisational analytics with ease.

Our three core SAS administration services

Selerity’s SAS administration services are uniquely catered to serving the various needs of organisations. Our service offering is divided into three specific segments – SAS Administration – Basic, SAS Administration – Standard, and SAS Administration – Custom. The illustration below specifies this categorisation of services in detail.

Our services have been uniquely categorised to fit our clients’ requirements. While the Basic and Standard packages are among our most sought after, we recognise the unique needs and specifications many business, both large and small, may have, which is why we offer a Custom service offering. Our administration services vary from single server coverage in the Basic offering to covering a 3-Tier environment in the Standard offering to potentially covering multiple servers in a Custom setup.

Our administration services include monthly and quarterly SAS environment maintenance conducted by our team, regular SAS Hot Fixes, and access to an online SAS environment performance dashboard.

Having operated in the analytics space as a SAS Silver partner for a decade and by leveraging the countless years of shared SAS experience among our team members, we have strengthed our position as a strategic SAS administration services provider both here in Australia and abroad. Our services are constantly being leveraged by many organisations and we are proud to say that through our services and our role as a Silver partner, we have enabled several of our clients to benefit from significant savings – in certain instances ranging in the millions of dollars.

If you would like to know more about our SAS administration services, our company and our work with SAS, in addition to how you can leverage our other SAS installation and hosting services, feel free to reach out to us, or stay tuned to this feed.