Creating a connection establishes communication, or a handshake, between the managed gateway and your SAP back end systems. Direct Connectivity is one of the two deployment options supported with the integration of SAP Ariba solutions. In this deployment option, the documents are directly sent from the managed gateway to your back end SAP systems or directly received from your back end SAP systems into the managed gateway, without any middleware application.
However, to ensure the security of your back end SAP systems, the inbound documents are routed via SAP Cloud Connector. In the Connection step of an integration project, you can configure a new connection or choose from existing connections. You must configure connections for both Test and Production environments.
Note
It is recommended to have Test and Production environments pointing to separate back end systems. In most of the cases, you will configure separate connections for Test and Production environments, or you can specify a single connection that applies to both the environments using the Environment parameter in the configuration.