Many blue chip businesses have chosen to migrate their SAP workloads to Azure. Here we’ll set out the incredible benefits this will deliver.
SAP is a powerful tool, but often an on-premises infrastructure is not suitable for hosting such workloads and will often cause major problems for the proprietary business.
The solution is SAP on Azure.
Every company that wants to be competitive, needs a customisable SAP infrastructure in order to monitor and manage centralised operations and strategic analysis.
An on-premises solution demands that the company purchases necessary hardware every 2-3 years to host the SAP infrastructure. However a preliminary analysis is required to anticipate what hardware is necessary in the next cycle. It’s clear that it it’s really hard to estimate the workloads for those oncoming years. In fact, this kind of infrastructure can’t follow these workload variations, so it’s impossible to respond to business opportunities in an efficient manner. Another drawback is that the company needs to manage and monitor the infrastructure, often moving away from the core business and spending time and money.
In a rapidly evolving scenario like ours, it is clear that there is a need for dynamic, robust and automated infrastructure, which can eliminate the burdens of hardware obsolescence cycle and pre-purchase capacity.
The solution we propose solves all these drawbacks, providing other benefits in addition: hosting SAP on the Azure Cloud.
Thanks to the extensive partnership between Microsoft and SAP, now you can run a wide range of SAP applications in regard to developing / testing and producing full-featured Azure scenarios.
SAP (Systems, Application and Products in data processing) is an Enterprise Resources Planning (ERP) software that provides end to end solutions for financial, logistics, distribution and inventories. All business processes are centralised and are executed in one SAP system, sharing common information with everyone. For big companies, this software has such a huge impact that often the workloads become too big and unpredictable to be hosted on an on-premises solution.
For this reason, and many others, we’ve introduced SAP on Azure. This solution allows hosting SAP workloads on the Azure cloud, which is particularly suitable for these kind of workloads. Compatibility and efficiency are granted by the recent partnership, resulting in several certified products, such as SAP NetWeaver and S/4 HANA. it must be emphasised that for each infrastructure there are infinitely different solutions for SAP on Azure. In principle, you could migrate the complete infrastructure on or just part of it (hybrid infrastructure), providing many benefits to the company.
Azure provides a flexible, scalable and efficient infrastructure, in terms of virtual machines (IaaS) and other software and platforms. Azure can boast a much larger global coverage than other cloud providers, ensuring high accessibility to its services even for multinationals with different locations on the planet. You can decide to deploy your SAP workloads on a classical Azure VM or on a dedicated bare metal machine called “Azure large instance”, which can guarantee very high performance. It is possible to use several databases like SQL, Oracle and also the SAP solution HANA, which is an in-memory platform that lets you accelerate business processes and simplify your IT environment.
You can also choose between Windows and Linux operative systems, in order to get support for these solutions. The partnership with Azure lets the customer integrate SAP with other Microsoft products like Office 365, Sharepoint Online, Cortana and Power BI.
In order to effectively deploy your SAP infrastructure on Azure, it is important to understand the resources needed and workloads expected, not only in the medium term, but also in peak moments. With this information you can choose the typology of machine, DB and additional components required for a medium workload. For this reason, it is important to make an accurate and detailed assessment of all physical and virtual machines.
Eventually it is possible to schedule additional machines, to grant scalability for peak periods and disaster recovery, plus other solutions and products, to provide high performance connectivity, backup and storage on the cloud, management and monitoring tools, etc.
With Azure you can easily and quickly provision a dev and/or test environments, that it are very useful and suitable; in fact, with Azure, you pay only for utilised resources.
After the assessment and the deployment phases, it is necessary to monitor how the infrastructure works and understand if any changes are needed. Monitoring and management can be efficiently automated in order to save your company time and to avoid bottlenecks which could slow down the workflow of the company.
Many companies are scared to put all their data on the cloud, thinking that they will lose control of their data. However it must be remembered that the commitment with with which Microsoft protects data means that instead of losing control, companies will be steadily delegating control over Microsoft’s experience instead.
As we have seen, the benefits of SAP on Azure are many. However, we can summarise them in the following points:
As we have seen, the benefits of SAP on Azure will open up infinite possibilities for your company. These advantages justify the trend from the past few years whereby many companies have or have considered migrating their SAP infrastructure to Azure. For a company that wants to emerge and be competitive in the context of digital transformation and Industry 4.0, an SAP Azure transition is just a matter of time. Take advantage of it, simplify your systems, reduce the effort of hosting an on-premises infrastructure, and return to focusing on your core business.
So the question is why are not you still on Azure?