SAP on Azure - why it makes sense

The investments between Microsoft and SAP keep on rolling and you keep seeing announcements and great how-to content as follow (as of Mid 22). Only improving the already strong value proposition.

This short article discusses...

• ...orchestrating SAP workloads consistently using Azure Center for SAP Solutions
• ...integrating easier and better using SAP CDC for Azure DataFactory
• ...securing your SAP workloads using Microsoft Sentinel
• ...extending your SAP investments into Azure for accelerated innovation

Announcing Public Preview for Microsoft Azure Center for SAP Solutions

Azure Center for SAP solutions brings together a set of Azure services to power a single unified experience to deploy and manage SAP workloads end to end by bringing new services, tools and frameworks together at one place. Customers can use this to run their SAP workloads directly or they can rely on a Microsoft Azure partner.

?"With Azure Center for SAP Solutions, we will be able to streamline, automate, and accelerate the deployment of enterprise SAP workloads in Azure, with orchestration consistency across landscapes," says Patrick Osterhaus, President, Protera.

Announcing Public Preview of the SAP CDC solution in Azure Data Factory and Azure Synapse Analytics

For many of our customers, SAP systems are critical to their business operations. As organizations mature, become more sophisticated, and graduate from using only descriptive analytics to adopting more predictive/prescriptive analytics, they want to combine their SAP data with non-SAP data in Azure, where they can leverage the advanced data integration and analytics capabilities to generate timely business insights. ADF is a data integration (ETL/ELT) Platform as a Service (PaaS) and, for SAP data integration, ADF currently offers six connectors:?

(Read the full article here)

Microsoft Sentinel* solution for SAP

SAP systems and applications handle massive amounts of sensitive data that is hosted on Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Amazon Web Services (AWS), or on-premises infrastructure. The SAP ecosystem is complex and difficult for security operations (SecOps) teams to effectively monitor and protect. The Microsoft Sentinel solution for SAP allows you to monitor, detect, and respond to suspicious activities and guard your business-critical data against sophisticated cyberattacks.

If you are hands-on into Kubernetes and appreciate IT Security, this practical guide is for you - discussing deploying Sentinel with SAP agents in your Kubernetes Cluster.

*) Microsoft Sentinel comes with a number of connectors for Microsoft solutions, available out of the box and providing real-time integration, including Microsoft 365 Defender (formerly Microsoft Threat Protection) solutions, and Microsoft 365 sources, including Office 365, Azure AD, Microsoft Defender for Identity (formerly Azure ATP), and Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps, and more. In addition, there are built-in connectors to the broader security ecosystem for non-Microsoft solutions. You can also use common event format, Syslog or REST-API to connect your data sources with Microsoft Sentinel as well.

Extend your SAP applications and data to innovate on Azure

This great Azure Friday video (I would recommend to subscribe to of course) discusses various options and considerations for driving even more innovation by leveraging Azure services.?Connect to SAP via Excel and query for data you need - and many more ideas! Addressing both low-code as well as pro-code options.

Talking of video content, here is another new YouTube Channel you may want to watch.

Quote:

"Me and my colleague Nishan Naicker and SAMBIT MISHRA (…) started a YouTube channel to discuss about how you can build your SAP landscape on Azure and run smart."

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Just a glimpse, really

With this collection of news and links you may have gotten already a feel for the breadth of complementary, synergetic offerings being ramped up right now - only improving the strong foundation that already existed. This is not exhaustive. And there is a lot more to come I may not share at this point of time. Covering everything from smart data management to automation to operations management, security and so much more.

If you want to stay up to date and get great summaries and explanations of why, how and what SAP and Microsoft do to empower your business and get the best value end-to-end, make sure to follow Holger and his publications for more on the subject!