By: Siddharth Purwar, Cloud Consultant

As public cloud adoption rate is increasing year-on-year, one question that remains constantly stuck in the mind – “When is the ideal time to move mission-critical workloads like SAP to Cloud?” There is no distinct answer to this question. The appropriate response is everything relies on the innovation reception culture of the individual organization. Some of the world’s leading organizations embrace technological innovation so fast that their technology outsourcing partners are learning from them.

SAP is core of any organization; migrating SAP to public cloud impacts the people, processes and technology. With advancement of technology in a highly competitive world, CTOs/CIOs must make decisions to keep the organization growth at par with competitors. The key building blocks of this decision-making process are lower TCO and operational efficiency. Until unless these two parameters are not at CTOs/CIOs table, it will slow down the decision-making process and bring up the question “Would it be advisable for me to move SAP workload to Public Cloud?”

Public Cloud, such as AWS/Azure are addressing these questions and enabling CTOs/CIOs to take this bold step. The AWS/Azure Cloud can help you move faster, operate more securely, and save substantial costs; all while benefitting from the scale and performance of the cloud. Running SAP workload at AWS/Azure is not only simplifying the operations, but also lowering the TCO apart from delivering in-direct benefits, such as improved user experience, scalability, flexibility, and security and so forth.

Below are the prime business objectives that can be achieved by migrating SAP workload to AWS/Azure.

Simplifying the SAP infrastructure operations

SAP on AWS/Azure gives consistent incorporation of SAP landscapes and swifter migration to AWS/Azure, while shielding your business from downtime and lost revenues. This utilization-based service provides high scalability, maximum flexibility and enhanced business flexibility, in addition to it improves tasks across the full stack – from the AWS/Azure infrastructure through the application administration layer. Some of the operational benefits are:

• Refresh cycle time reduction up to 50% using AWS Lambda and Step Function
• Increment in Backup Success rate due to usage of Snapshots and automated scheduling assistant/li>
• Time to provision parallel environment for time sensitive projects reduced from days to merely 12 hours

Lowering the TCO

Beyond lowering platform and operations cost, AWS/Azure turns infrastructure costs from being capital expenses (CAPEX) into variable operational costs (OPEX). The SAP TCO model includes all hardware, software, and service components, needed for an implementation plus a five-year life cycle of an SAP installation. The typical elements are:

• Hardware/Software Investment
• Implementation of Hardware/Software
• Hardware/Software Ongoing Cost
• Operations
• Continuous Improvement Projects
• Upgrade Projects

The overall five-year TCO savings when running SAP on AWS/Azure range between 16% and 22%. The major savings are in infrastructure investment, implementation and operations. This is because, when you use the cloud, you don’t need any capital investments except the license cost for SAP and databases. Some of the cost benefits are:

• On-demand switch-off of environments means that there are no NPAs hidden, and everything is delivered as a utility service
• Keep environments for recovery purposes without additional cost
• Archive data and the corresponding SAP systems audit-proof without running costs and always available

Faster HANA Adoption

With the SAP announcement that all its customers will need to move from their current version of SAP Business Suite to SAP S/4 Hana by 2025, AWS/Azure is providing platform capabilities for a wider range of SAP HANA machines. Deploying SAP HANA at on-premise in TDI model not only takes longer time to deploy considering the procurement and implementation time, but also comes with huge capital investment, operational overhead, hardware refresh, etc. challenges. With AWS/Azure, you can achieve:

• Faster go-to-market time (provision infrastructure for SAP HANA in hours)
• Scale infrastructure resources on demand
• Reduce cost by paying only for consumed cloud services
• Achieve higher level of availability

Conclusion

SAP transformation to hyper-scale cloud providers like AWS/Azure, are gaining traction for both non-production and production workloads. In any case, it can’t be denied that migrating an SAP workload to the public cloud takes significant investment and effort. CTOs/CIOs need to assess, where they are in their current SAP lifecycle and what they believe the future for their SAP platform, while deciding on their strategy of running SAP workload at AWS/Azure.