Clarity PPM SaaS Transition: Overview

[Suman Pramanik]

Welcome to the Clarity PPM SaaS Transition Blog series. This blog series will provide you updates around the Clarity PPM SaaS transition to the Google Cloud Platform™ (GCP). In order to keep our customers informed of our SaaS transition, we will be posting blogs, on a regular basis, on various transition-related topics.

 

Let's start this post by reviewing the current status. As of Jan 2020, Broadcom has started provisioning new customers in the GCP based SaaS platform. We have also made progress towards transitioning current Clarity PPM SaaS customers to GCP.

 

However, the original Clarity PPM SaaS transition timeline, communicated in October 2019, has been delayed. We intend to begin the Clarity PPM SaaS transitions in March 2020. The initial set of customers targeted to transition to GCP, in March, have been contacted by their single point of contact (PoC) from Broadcom. These customers are now preparing for the transition.

 

While you wait for your Broadcom PoC to contact you, let's review some key activities that you will perform after they contact you: 

 

1. Be ready to discuss the transition plan and details with the PoC. An overview of the transition plan is covered in this blog post. The detailed transition plan will be addressed in our next post.
2. Conclude development activities before beginning the transition of the non-production environment and move/backup the development data to the production environment.
3. If your organization's firewall includes IP address filtering, you will need to update the firewall settings to allow inbound traffic from the external facing IP addresses of the service in GCPs.
4. Work with your PoC to ensure that you can reach the GCP datacenter from your business network.
5. Work with your integration team to initiate an HTTPS call to the URL that will be shared for your region to ensure that inbound integrations to the service are also reachable.

 

Overview of the Transition Process

 

The high-level process that we will follow to migrate Clarity PPM SaaS from our current data center to GCP is given below. Our next blog post on 2nd March will provide more information about how to be ready for the SaaS transition.

 

Service Changes and Considerations

 

Now that you understand the transition process, let's review some changes you will encounter after you have migrated to GCP.

 

1. URL Changes: Your organization will be able to access Clarity PPM using the same URL as they did before the migration. However, URLs for the following functionality will change and the new URLs will be provided to you as your respective environment is transitioned to GCP.

• Jaspersoft
• OData
• SFTP
• SSO Deeplink

 

 2. VPN: Certain customers were provided time-bound VPN access for direct database connection, on an exception basis, to the current SaaS platform. This functionality will be deprecated in the new platform. As an alternative, after the transition to the GCP data center, we recommend customers explore the use of the OData REST API to connect to the data warehouse database for necessary reporting information. In addition, the OData service will provide a WebSQL functionality that allows admins to write/test queries against the DWH schema. Remember that WebSQL is for validating queries and viewing a small amount of data. WebSQL cannot be used for data extraction.

 3. Portal and SSO: The SaaS Portal (as it's used today) will be replaced with a new SSO solution in the new SaaS infrastructure. Customers who use the Portal for Federated SSO should work with Broadcom to update the deep link integration between customers IdP and Clarity PPM. We intend to retain Portal functionality in the new SSO solution, however, one change will be to the login username to be the user's email address. We will have a detailed blog post and documentation on using Federated SSO for Clarity PPM (GCP) very soon.

 4. Clarity PPM Database: As part of the transition, the database that hosts Clarity PPM schemas will change from Oracle™ to PostgreSQL™.

 Key Benefits of Transitioning to GCP

 

Let's end this blog post by reviewing some of the key benefits of migrating to the GCP platform.

 

1. World-Class Security

• GCP provides a secure-by-design infrastructure, built-in protection, encryption at rest, and a global network used to protect all customer information, identities, applications, & devices.
• Standard security & compliance certifications are available for the data center itself and the Clarity PPM service.

      2. Scalability & performance

• Leveraging GCP's global network, customers can expect faster, consistent, & scalable performance.
• Improved service and reduced maintenance windows

      3. Automated Updates

• Leveraging GCP's global network, customers can expect faster, consistent, & scalable performance.
• Improved service and reduced maintenance windows
• Eliminate administrative overheads associated with obtaining new releases.

 

Thank you for being a part of the Clarity PPM community. Please write to [e-mail] in case you have any specific questions for us. The next blog post covering how to be ready for SaaS transition and will be published on 2nd March 2020.

#ca_clarity_ppm #gcp #clarityppmsaas

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Thanks & Regards
Suman Pramanik
Sr. Principal Support Engineer | Customer Success & Support, Enterprise Software Division
Broadcom
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[System]

Thank you for sharing this important information with the community Suman!

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Chris Hackett
Community Manager, Broadcom Enterprise Software Division
Broadcom Inc.
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[Uruj Pruthi]

Thanks for sharing :)