RISE with SAP -Selecting IaaS Public Cloud AWS, Azure or Google GCP

I have worked on SAP engagement for enterprise customers for almost 20+ years. While SAP continued to develop application features and content during these years, generally the hosting of SAP fell into the same classic selection process as any application: what is the service level, what is the cost, who has the happiest customers?

However, with the advent of public cloud (IaaS), those tried and tested criteria no longer give customers an accurate evaluation of each option. As such, here are top three key criteria evaluated by SAP customers for freezing their SAP hosting options.

Reliability

We expect public cloud to be more resilient than on-premise. And, while this is generally true, not all clouds are equal – especially for applications such as SAP. You will need to evaluate the amount of downtime each hyperscaler has experienced over the last 12-18 months in your business regions. Gartner report suggest AWS Azure & GCP all major IaaS Cloud SLAs can be meaningless so you need right SI partner to navigate thru this technical nuances.

Hyperscalers provide the platform to run your SAP environment; what they don't provide internally is their services to migrate you to their platform. You still need to rely on trusted partners to plan and execute your move to the cloud. After you've moved, you and your trusted SI will be responsible for managing that SAP environment. Not the hyperscaler. At YASH we have predefined ready template to understand data, complexity, location challenge and pricing plans used for our Fortune SAP clients. While i am right now deploying RISE with SAP on private cloud in ten-country roll-out - YASH as a value partner can bring in 100+ lesson learned on AWS AZURE and GCP projects that we have delivered for our clients saving millions in downtime or SLA or penalties .

Cost

As the year 2022 approaches, an increasing number of board members & CIO's are asking ‘what is the value of moving to the cloud’? my experience suggest all early stage Enterprise agreements, short-term discounts, migration funding and any kind of negotiated costs can be deceiving. Clients need good value partner to understand nuances of background refresh, metered billing, and volume game .

Pay-as-you-go model that's the idea behind the hyperscaler's Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) model. While easy math can suggest data-center set-up cost, maintenance cost, hardware set-up , and payroll cost for IT staff will clearly showcase strong business case for moving to cloudi have always recommended clientsto have value partners for this negotiations . At YASH we have helped over 6000+ large SAP clients to understand nuances of technical IT Landscape, refresh speed, location, amount of data transferred, discounts you can claim with AWS AZURE & GCP : on usage, commitment, volume, etc. below are some of the public case study for overall TCO and ROI's for running Sap on cloud -

• One of my past client where we upgraded SAP 4.7 to ECC recently moved SAP to Azure - Mercedes Daimler group reduced operational costs by 50 percent and increased agility by spinning up resources on-demand in 30 minutes with SAP S/4HANA and Azure, empowering 400,000 global suppliers
• Colgate-Palmolive provisioned a new SAP Hybris e-commerce platform in 1 day on Google Cloud Platform versus an internal effort that would of required 8-10 weeks

AWS Simple monthly calculator helps you predict your monthly AWS bills , sameway Azure calculator will give you hourly or monthly fees for Azure and also there is SAP estimator click the image on side to get quotes on all three hyperscalers. ( believe me nothing is more easier then to ping me on Linkedin ?? )

Innovation

The best innovation is happening in the cloud these days and, as everything is or will be in the cloud eventually, innovation and speed to innovation needs to be an integral part of your IT road map . one such example AI Driven integration – with more embedded ML being applied to business processes, AI driven integration is key to maintaining integration across the enterprise by providing a coherent capability that automates and reduces complexity.

For a 25 years IT roadmap automation is the most important secret ingredient of them all. Automation not only allows you to do things automatically, remotely and quickly, but also with more quality. Quality builds for installed software systems, like SAP, are essential.In conjunction with running and integrating SAP into a Hyperscaler, with innoavtive platform you could leverage some of the tooling within the Hyperscaler, example - Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) with Google AutoML using Google BigQuery . if you like subject would also suggest read for Google Analytics and Machine Learning Benefits for SAP Customer. GCP also has a focus on integration to their other toolsets to enhance your SAP experience.

Major hyperscalers are incredibly similar for offering Security, Scalability, Performance & Speed, BYOL Licensing offers, DR/ HA perspective- so for now i restricted my article to only major differentiating bullet points used by C-suite and Board members in boardroom when it comes to modernizing, upgrading their cloud ERP ambition .