"Cloud" is the path to go but.. How? Which model fit with my technology & business? First & future steps?

We have been trying to answer questions & bring solutions to customer business problems for many years, obviously by using latest technology possible if required but with always thinking of the usage in the end, therefore having business use cases in mind. (Do we really?) Sometimes we fall in love with the technology, focus on forcing the usage of technology itself, without thinking whether it's applicable in the real world & whether it's feasible to use this technology/software/solution. The ugly truth is if there's no business case, failure is guaranteed even before beginning.. 

However; there's the other side of the coin where business users/managers, non technical consultants, sales people need to understand the solutions and concepts from a technical perspective, at least to some point, so that they can evaluate what to offer / and what is offered to them to come with more innovative ideas. With technologies evolving very fast and tons of different concepts, buzzwords, solutions, it's not very easy to follow what's the latest, what's the correct one, correct order to use them even sometimes what are we talking about. There's a high possibility that they misunderstand and/or misdirect when they don't have an idea about the technology tools while combining with business cases. 

"Cloud" is one of these big concepts and buzz-words where some customers, even consultants have bad moments while solving the confusion and get lost in discussions.

One way or another I have touched these concept for years therefore I would like to write about my opinion and I will try to explain very briefly, what are these Cloud Models and SAP's portfolio for these models as an introduction. And I will try to complete the cycle with usage examples combining technical and business perspective for the cloud.

 This will only be a quick summary for the subject. In case there is demand, I may give more details in the following articles.

It is always said : "We are using / planning to use CLOUD" in the discussions for technical architecture and strategy.

Which cloud model - solution, which functions, which steps and in what order are the key questions to be answered.

As customers have different requirements and different environments, vendors provide different kinds of cloud models&services; so does SAP-with additional business value. Let's start with understanding what we have in hand:

1- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

(Private Managed Cloud) - SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud(HEC)

 IaaS is simply the model where customers use computing resources such as storage, network, services etc. over the cloud without purchasing hardware. Then they have the option to deploy their software, applications and systems on top of these resources but do not manage a datacentre and / or physical resources and other related issues. It's not simply paying monthly rent for a hardware as vendors provide many additional managed services on top while customers are mostly paying for exactly how much they use without worrying about scaling, maintenance and other related services. 

With regards to SAP's solution proposal, SAP provides SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud with additional managed , scalable and secure infrastructure services on top of classic IaaS solutions with different licensing options. With HEC, customers can move their applications to the cloud and enjoy the secure end-to-end private managed cloud with SAP's product knowledge and expertise, while IT can focus more on business use cases without dealing with details of managing the environment, they deal with the results.

SAP's offering can be used with the flexibility of different hyperscale IaaS providers (such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, Alibaba Cloud..)

From a technical perspective, any customer application can be moved to the platform this way and can be managed without paying too much effort for infrastructure related issues. Deployed applications are scaled easily within minutes, monitored better and standardized with modern infrastructure components, and from business perspective companies just expect the performance&SLA from the computing power and services, focus on what they need to build using this capacity.

A typical scenario happens for instance when you need to have additional computing resources for your applications; such as when you are testing your applications in different stages, for performance issues, in the phases of project development, migrations etc. and you can shut them down when no longer required after these stages are finished. Or when you require resources immediately in times that you are expecting more load for your productive applications. For instance when the demand is high in a campaign period, high order or production periods etc. There may be times when there are additional technical resources required for new business projects and you have to be agile, then again you don't have to worry about the time passed when you order new hardware and integrate them to your current environment; you just request, provision and have it within a very short period of time. If you formulate your business and align parallel with your technical solutions in an agile way like this then it means you are responding very quickly to the changing market conditions & new ideas from the business. 

2- Platform as a service (PaaS)

SAP Cloud Platform (SCP)

PaaS offers the customers a platform (framework & tools) to develop, integrate applications, without worrying about underlying infrastructure. This platform enables customers for being agile and go one step further as it's not only computing resources & managed services but also mostly latest versions of the development capabilities where customers can enjoy integrating with their other businesses, technical systems, machines etc.. while providing them standard modern solutions faster with the additional help of the additional ready-to-go or template scenarios on top of the framework and tools.

SAP's proposal for PaaS is SAP Cloud Platform where you can build personalized applications, integrate your apps with your on-prem, cloud applications and other third party non-SAP applications easily. In order to extend current applications, SAP Cloud Platform is offered as the best way, as it's the most advanced and flexible platform which is evolving & extending with the best-of-breed technology solutions. 

This is very important as customer landscapes are now more complex, there are a lot of solutions both on prem and cloud, from multi vendors, using various technologies that need to be integrated, therefore it takes time and slows down businesses to respond quickly. Developing and integrating these solutions in one place on your watch, with minor changes and with possible as-ready-to-go way should be the approach to follow. While doing this, best practices, standard services such as options for authentication, message exchange, low level integration services should be a service of the platform which IT departments should pay minimum efforts.

As an example for the usage, think of this scenario:

Customer's financial data stays in SAP on-prem system, while using Salesforce for sales automation and SuccessFactors for HR. SCP will be a central point where you get necessary information from SAP Business Suite - S/4HANA, SalesForce and SuccessFactors combine them in a modern application with access to end-users and behind the scenes update all systems once done without duplicating data or having to enter data from multiple applications. From an IT perspective, this is less effort as the underlying platform provides you as much of out-of-the-box integration (connectors, security .. ) and development capabilities (SDKs, APIs, persistance, user interface technologies) within one SCP system, so that they can focus on business value and provide more solutions. On the other side employees and business partners use modern interfaces without even knowing how many systems they are utilizing at the same time with the help of integration.

Technically speaking, customers may follow a step-by-step approach and have many options:

• They may require to extend your current on premise solutions first. Business Suite / S/4HANA can be extended with new user interfaces and applications starting from some line of business applications: Sales, Maintenance, HR, Finance.. This can be done with new scenarios, modern user interfaces and flexible technologies.
• SCP provides many flexible development options i.e : You can develop a Web/Fiori application in SCP and / or expose your choice of functionality as a service from SCP to your employees / suppliers' systems with flexible technologies. (from a very simple purchase order approval to a complex application having multiple calculations, different stages of approvals, integrating with third party cloud systems or vendors, banks ..) 
• SCP connects to your on-premise solutions natively&securely, uses the data within the on-prem system and provides to an external systems or applications through framework, and manage-monitor the flow of the data. Many of these interfaces are out-of-the box therefore you don't need to start from scratch while developing them. If you want to integrate with your business partner, legal authorities, banks etc. to your environment-on premise solutions etc(but with a controlled and secure approach), with the help of SCP, you can provide them APIs in a standard way. IT departments then provide the solution easier; at the same time focus on the business aspects of the projects more while external business partners can integrate to your business network easily. SAP is adding more out-of-the-box APIs, best practice workflows, connectors, user interfaces and business scenarios to the portfolio day by day, therefore it's easy to choose among them or use them as a starting point.
• On top of these the same platform offers "Intelligent Technologies" such as Blockchain, Robotic Process Automation, Machine Learning, iOT,.. and much more capabilities. You can setup these technology scenarios within SCP and use the existing APIs, interfaces as much as possible, or easily integrate with the third party systems with utilizing already generated developments in case you have them. An example scenario would be, once you have made an integration to your business partner(supplier) system to gather and/or send vendor-product specific data with proper interfaces; later on you can easily design an internal web or mobile application or any scenario offered by the platform just with the usage of same interfaces/APIs in the same cloud system.

There are a lot of scenarios that may be utilized, but the idea is having your on-premise systems functional, extend them with various new applications through SCP and integrate them to other cloud and third party systems whenever required easily. This way business and IT will focus more on business ideas & outcomes, delivering faster. Underlying maintenance and best practice issues are handled by the services provided by the platform in SCP and PaaS solutions.

3-Software as a Service (SaaS)

SAP S/4HANA Cloud, Analytics Cloud, SuccessFactors, Ariba..

 SaaS is the most widely used cloud offering by the businesses and individuals. In this offering the responsibility of the businesses is only the usage of the software without even thinking about technology used, maintenance, implementation etc. Everything is made available by vendors/partners where businesses only focus on the outcomes and new features added. Not limited to but solutions are mostly accessible through browsers & mobile devices. There are a lot of individual or business applications from multiple vendors such as Dropbox, SalesForce, Office365 etc.

SAP is one of the leaders in cloud with a clear vision to provide business applications from the cloud; as a result SAP have many solutions as Software-as-a-Service in many lines of business. Examples are Cloud ERP, Cloud Procurement, Cloud Analytics, Cloud HR, Cloud CRM .. etc with product names such as S/4HANA Cloud, SuccessFactors, Ariba, Concur, Qualtrics.. Although they are open to implementation and extensions with new scenarios with consulting & projects; the idea is that they come up with ready-to-use best-practice scenarios. All you need to do is connecting them from a device - user interface and use it.

 Technically these applications are managed by vendors end-to-end, therefore upgrades are done periodically by the vendors. However from an implementation perspective customer specific scenarios may be required to be implemented. (additional local-legal requirements, customer specific requirements, extensions are also possible).

Another important part is the hybrid scenarios where more than one solution is used. Mostly because scenarios do not cover only one LoB, domain or environment; holistic, most effective and maintainable combination of these applications are required to provide best usage to the business. For this, extensibility and integration capabilities of these SaaS solutions gain importance which should be analyzed.

For instance you can have a very possible scenario where you get information from a machine that leads to a maintenance request + a purchasing request + some approvals and financial transaction; happening in different systems such as SAP Business Suite - S/4HANA, SAP Ariba, Supplier System and a platform to harmonize all this flow and applications. You can use SAP Cloud's capabilities to connect to iOT devices to gather information, use out-of-the-box APIs and integration for cloud based SaaS systems such as Ariba and through many open connectors to your suppliers system and develop an application to extend your Business Suite - S/4HANA for the users to see / monitor and approve these alerts and requests. You have the advantage if you have as much of this functionality within the platform.

Because of the nature of the business, environment needs to be complex so is the maintenance of these scenarios. Even in case of additional scenarios / updates in the individual systems, this way maintenance is much easier as every part is managing their side of business&upgrades but everything is presented to the end-users centrally. Once this is formulated adding of new functionality become much easier, such as adding a mobile interface or a traceability scenario via Blockchain where you already have the integration capabilities and flexibility of the cloud. 

As a summary of the models:

• in On -premise systems customers manage everything from servers, storage, network, operating systems, data, applications / solutions, licenses etc.
• in IaaS systems such as HANA Enterprise Cloud (HEC) computing resources are managed by the provider sometimes with additional managed services. Customers simply manage what is required on top and utilize these resources with their applications and expect an SLA guarantee from the provider.
• in PaaS systems such as SAP Cloud Platform SCP, providers manages middleware/integration tools, runtime environment on top of IaaS so that customers only focusing on developing, integrating and delivering solutions easier.
• in SaaS systems such as S/4HANA Cloud, SuccessFactors, Ariba, etc. data and applications itself are managed by the vendor, therefore customers only connect the applications and use the software without thinking about underlying technology and developments. 

The transition to the cloud is becoming a necessity and we hear more and more customers using cloud technologies with different scenarios and models that I explained above. Feel free to share yours /customers' stories as they are encouraging others and leading more innovative ideas.

Because these technologies are evolving very quickly, not the concepts but the names change frequently, updates may be required afterwards.

As this is a journey where every customers' priorities and environment is different; choosing of the right path and solutions therefore formulating the strategy / architecture is very important and vendors' vision & roadmaps should be carefully followed. 

In this article I intended to summarize about what is offered as cloud-models and name the corresponding solutions from SAP portfolio and most importantly pointing them both technically and from a business perspective, based on my experience. I didn't go into too much detail about each of them, new articles may follow after the feedbacks..