The notion of digitizing your business has become a matter of “when,” rather than “if.” For many, migrating critical workloads to the cloud is a key part of this transformation. When deciding on a cloud provider, however, IT executives are under pressure to find a solution that enables reduced costs, greater agility, and above all, the ability to innovate core business processes.
At the heart of many businesses embarking on this journey is their SAP environment. But since SAP workloads represent some of the most critical and deeply integrated business applications, IT executives are required to look for ways to execute this migration in the most timely and reliable manner. Organizations migrating to the cloud cannot risk application downtime or productivity loss.
Why Cloud for SAP?
For on-premise solutions, the implementation process represents the greatest overall expense. A typical implementation requires most, if not all, of the following expense items: hardware, software licenses, database licenses and external implementation consultants who usually assist in the design, perform the installation and provide training to staff.
Add to this the cost of housing an “industrial-strength” processing and storage capacity network infrastructure that is “cyber-safe” and is configured and maintained by high-priced IT experts.
Cloud-based SAP systems usually require much lower up-front costs due to the absence of any significant IT expenses such as hardware and support staff. Unlike on-premise solutions, the primary up-front and recurring cost is the periodic subscription fee for software hosted on remote third-party servers and accessed online. Subscriptions are usually pay-as-you-go, which means a lower initial investment and the ability to withdraw from the subscription if the solution doesn’t perform as desired.
One of the key advantages of a cloud-based SAP system is that periodic updates are usually built in to the subscription fee, meaning your software will always be up to date and you won’t have to worry about obsolescence and the eventual sizable upgrade fees that could come with an on-premise solution.
This is a simple comparison between Cloud and On-premise:
Accelerating the Shift to SAP HANA on Cloud-Native Architecture
The partnership between AWS and SAP goes back more than a decade. Not only is SAP one of AWS’s largest customers, but more than 5,000 customers run SAP on AWS. More than half of those businesses are using SAP HANA-based solutions.
SAP is encouraging its customers to adopt SAP HANA on a cloud-native architecture. The company has been transparent about its plans to accelerate this shift by ending support for legacy applications after 2027 in favor of SAP S/4HANA.
While customers will still have the option of running SAP HANA on-premises after that time, migrating to SAP HANA in the cloud will help companies realize the full range of scalability benefits and enhanced software offerings. This deadline provides a finite amount of time for customers to migrate, but it’s important they begin thinking through the process right now.
The companies that take advantage of the opportunity to modernize can realize the transformational advantages of scalable, reliable, and automated cloud infrastructure, while potentially relieving themselves of the need to buy, test, provision, and maintain their own hardware and software.
Monitoring and Management
Leveraging resources like Amazon CloudWatch and AWS Systems Manager enterprise-class monitoring and management features available to every customer, regardless of size.
Reduced storage costs and added flexibility are achievable through resources like Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes, a type of durable, block-level storage device that can be attached to a single Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance for data that requires frequent updates.
Customers can flexibly shift Online Transactional Processing (OLTP) storage choices between general-purpose SSD (gp2) and the high-performance provisioned IOPS SSD (io1) to obtain the optimal balance of speed and cost and to take advantage of lower-cost Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon S3 Glacier options.
Infrastructure-as-a-Code (IaaC) templates can be built to provision resources and automate the SAP installation consistently and repeatably. The AWS Quick Start for SAP HANA enables customers to deploy fully functional SAP HANA systems on AWS based upon best practices in less than an hour.
Developers can take advantage of modern, cloud-native platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environments that support the latest automation tools and rapid development techniques to build services that easily integrate with the full range of the AWS application portfolio.
Upgrades and patches are simplified through the availability of cloud-based “sandbox” environments that duplicate the production environment and enable customers to test changes on their own schedule without buying and installing hardware. Customers can use AWS Systems Manager, for example, to upgrade SAP HANA instances at scale without incurring downtime.
Why Work with FORTE CLOUD for SAP on AWS?
FORTE CLOUD helped many enterprise customers to migrate/deploy their SAP workloads to the AWS smoothly and without downtime.
There are a lot of services we provide to help you leverage the power of the AWS cloud for your SAP:
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- Cloud Assessment
- SAP Migration to Cloud.
- Cloud sizing and proof of concept.
- Cloud solution evaluation.
- Cloud architecture planning and High Availability.
- Cloud security architecture.
- Cloud implementation and environment provisioning.
- Cloud performance tuning.
- DevOps for SAP
Many enterprise customers choose to run SAP HANA and SAP S/4HANA on AWS because
they gain on-demand access to IT resources that support the memory-intensive workloads.
Additionally, by running on AWS, these organizations gain access to a broad and deep set of native services spanning emerging technologies. By integrating these services with their SAP workloads, organizations can continually innovate business processes and drive efficiency.
