SAP Cloud Migration – Keep Your Business Growing

SAP is already well known as one of the largest vendors of enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution having 12 million users all over the world. This German-based European multinational software corporation enabling its customers to run their business processes, including accounting, sales, production, human resources, and finance in an integrated environment. This enterprise solution ensures that any organization using SAP has information flows from one SAP component to another without any data redundancy. It also helps organizations to enforce financial, process and legal controls facilitating the effective use of resources, including manpower, machines and production capacities.

“According to one of the latest corporate fact sheet, SAP serves more than 404,000 customers in 180 countries, of which 80% are small and medium-sized businesses (SMB). The latter fact is a more recent departure from the company’s previous focus on large enterprise organizations. It’s estimated that 77% of all global business transactions come in contact with an SAP system”

Many SAP customers have been running SAP on-premise for decades and have been hesitating to harness the benefits of the public cloud. But as the public cloud has transformed IT and businesses, on-premise hosting has become harder to justify on this cloud-based era.  

While the long-established benefits of the cloud technology like- superior scalability and lower costs have only become more apparent as the technology has matured, SAP on public cloud has also overtaken on-premise hosting in areas like security, historically used to justify staying on site.

Here’s why it is the right time to migrate your SAP on public cloud:

1. Cost Savings

Resource pooling has drastically cut the costs of public cloud operation. This term includes data storage services, processing services and bandwidth provided services. Other related terms include rapid elasticity, which also involves the dynamic provisioning of services, and on-demand self-service, where customers could change their levels of service without actually contacting a service provider. By operating at hyper scale, public cloud providers can keep the cost of computing low, passing the savings on to tenants.

SAP on-premise to cloud migration also moves your business from large CapEx (capital expenditure) on hardware updates to stable OpEx (operational expenditure), where you only have to pay for the cloud computing you actually use.

2. Agility

SAP on public cloud can give your organizational activities more agility and flexibility. Your on-premise servers limit the resources that you have installed. On the other hand,  unforeseen growth in resource demand can impact on your whole performance of the system.

Where SAP on public cloud, there’s no need to plan hardware upgrades to meet your growing demand, you can provision resources instantly. SAP on public cloud also incorporates built-in life-cycle activities like system copy and snapshot which also improves the agility of your business.

3. Efficiency

Your SAP on public cloud allows you to meter and automate your resource usage to maximize efficiency. Resources can be spun up during times of high demand, then turned off again to control spend and reduce waste. So, you can experience a real-time increase in the efficiency level of your user, hardware and overall process. As all these three pillars are interconnected. If one fails, no doubt you’re efficiency plummets like a brick in an Olympic swimming pool.

4. Scalability

Moving SAP to cloud gives your business the privilege to access unlimited resources virtually, with multiple data centers available in each region. SAP on public cloud take into account- database sizes, downtime requirements, and interface complexity to scale up with your business demand. This allows you to size the systems for their current workloads and add to scale the capacity as it is needed for new demands such as IoT projects, or business needs like mergers or moving into new markets etc.

5. Abstraction

On cloud, abstraction converts the physical assets your landscape relies on to digital processes. Your SAP landscape on cloud computing process is no longer dependent on one particular set of hardware systems, which have to be carefully monitored and tuned to ensure proper system functioning.

Additionally, running SAP on public cloud enables your business to benefit from a Software Defined Everything (SDE) environment. This provides a foundation for interpretation and automation of all cloud services, makes your landscape more robust and significantly reduces the cost of maintenance.

6. Elasticity

The cloud greatly improves disaster recovery, availability and business continuity. On cloud, your SAP achieves the ability to spring back into previous condition during any mishap. With replicated storage, and the ability to harness multiple network providers, your business can avoid the risks that come with running your SAP landscape out of a single private data center. High availability is built-in on cloud, and users can meet arbitrary resiliency requirements at a much lower cost.

7. Security

SAP on-premise hosting can be very secure if done properly. On the other hand, very few companies have the resources to maintain the SAP on-premise hosting. The modern public cloud is designed around security, with extensive network hardening and testing, standard encryption and built-in access control. Third-party security certification and support for a wide range of compliance regimes greatly reduce the risks of breaches and data theft. So your SAP on public cloud is completely secured.