Now more than ever, enterprises need to be agile, customer-focused and resilient to stay ahead of the explosive competition. With a complex business landscape, and siloed business processes, enterprises often face challenges that have an adverse impact on the bottom line. Hence, for such legacy businesses, transformation is often perceived as a risky affair even though its utmost needed to continue innovating at scale and suffice new-age consumer demands.
In reality, most of these businesses operate with mission-critical business applications such as that of SAP to conduct their day-to-day business. To successfully scale up digital transformation efforts, this SAP and IT core needs to be shifted to cloud. This is critical to make their core operations agile, leverage analytics to make meaningful operational decisions, super-charge workloads and processes, and deliver next-gen innovative experiences for customers without a delay. Unless the central foundations are modernized and transformed, an enterprise shall fail to move to the next step effectively. This blog highlights more.
Today business leaders lose their sleep over customers, products and services, and market competition, but rarely worry about facility management or payroll processing. An intelligent suite has already set a great foundation. SAP renders innovations that drive the core business success, and produce results while delivering next-gen customer experience. It offers an unmatched range of functionality and facilitates end-to-end processes across verticals.
But things are shifting. Increasing regulation requirements, changing market dynamics, digital technologies, and data-driven business models disrupt well-balanced supply networks, disintegrate markets, and impact opportunities. This challenges large-scale enterprises to keep pace.
Developing a digital enterprise platform that empowers core processes, SAP provides an agile layer supporting cloud-based services which run on Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.
Why move to SAP on Cloud?
SAP is already known for being the world’s leading Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software. It built an impressive legacy of implementing simpler and more efficient workflows into its products. It has been supporting organizations worldwide in managing nearly every aspect of their business, from sales and finance to HR and logistics.
As an effective software for ERP, SAP connects each part of a business through an intelligent platform. S/4HANA is SAP’s flagship enterprise resource planning suite, and S/4HANA Cloud is the hosted version for companies that don’t want to run the solution on-premise. Moving the legacy SAP ERP apps to cloud or opting for the S/4HANA version on any cloud of choice would arm businesses with cutting-edge capabilities to reform and conduct their core operations. Embracing advanced tech such as AI, Analytics, IoT, Blockchain, Automation in operational processes become faster than ever while guaranteeing end users with highly available experiences anytime, anywhere.
The SAP cloud platform is SAP’s platform-as-a-service that runs on existing Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offerings. The platform comprises the SAP S/4 HANA cloud that supports other cloud apps such as SAP SuccessFactors and SAP Hybris solutions. This gives access to a feature-rich, easy-to-deploy cloud environment.
The SAP platform offers a comprehensive set of services for integration, enterprise mobility, client collaboration, and analytics capabilities at scale. It enables enterprises to easily develop, deploy, and manage cloud-based apps supporting their SAP or non-SAP solutions, either on-premise or on-demand. As a Platform-as-a-service, SAP offers cutting-edge services including availability, scalability, and multi-tenancy.
For instance, users can detach application extensions from the operation of that application. It allows them to update apps frequently without impacting backend systems while saving resources and accelerating time to market. Developers’ productivity can be improved through active collaboration, code sharing, and reusable services. Many SAP customers are switching to the cloud to leverage these benefits.
Migrate, Modernize and Manage SAP Effectively on the Cloud
According to a Gartner report, 85% of organizations will operate with a cloud-first approach and 95% of new digital workloads will be deployed on the Cloud by 2025. The Cloud has emerged as the clear path forward for future enterprise IT infrastructure. Let’s get into the benefits of migrating, modernizing, and managing SAP on the Cloud.
Cost Reduction
The best way to begin modernizing is by identifying the existing technical debt and accessing the SAP ERP system to see what assets can be truncated. This reduces the number of customizations needed during an assessment, enabling incremental modernization. The Cloud itself comes with a host of benefits, from lower TCO to faster product developments and large-scale business transformations. Overall, time, effort, and money are saved.
Increased Visibility, Speed and Automation
Modernizing SAP applications, databases, infra and migrating to the Cloud can ensure that business operations are monitored and accounted for while improving the speed at which these operations are performed. Additionally, migrating to the Cloud can greatly improve the analytics and cognitive intelligence of legacy business applications. Potential risks as well as opportunities can be identified.
Improved Productivity
Migrating SAP workloads to Microsoft Azure, AWS, or Google Cloud leads to enhanced capabilities for collaboration, mobility, collaboration, and efficiency. Companies have recorded a 30% increase in workforce performance and productivity, along with a 50% TCO reduction and a 60% reduction in data storage costs. This happens because teams are empowered with access to core business data, real-time on-demand BI, and advanced analytics.
Digital Transformations
Among the key digital transformation initiates made possible with cloud-based SAP are big data, predictive analytics, streamlined IoT deployments, user-experience transformations, and new cloud service offerings. By migrating your business-critical SAP systems to the Cloud sooner than later, you will be able to leverage digital transformations for far-sighted innovations at a faster pace.
Future-proofed Operations
Cloud or hybrid S/4HANA deployments can help reduce CapEx and OpEx costs by as much as 30%, orchestrate faster software deployments, introduce new DevOps processes, and remove the constraints posed by siloed data and legacy systems that are nearing end-of-support.
How to Migrate, Modernize and Manage SAP Effectively on Cloud?
Moving mission-critical SAP applications from legacy on-premise environment and modernizing them on the Cloud is a complex undertaking. Breaking it up into different phases will allow you to see the big picture to accomplish modernization and migration successfully to the Cloud. Here’s a step-by-step guide on how you can execute the same:
Assessment & Planning
In the first phase, it is important to build synchronicity with all stakeholders who will be involved in the digital transformation of the SAP environment. Team members must assess the existing SAP ERP system and get concurrence on the future steps in the modernization journey. With the support of expert MSPs, companies can get powerful assessments and customizations, along with precise TCO and rate of change calculations.
Migration to Cloud
Users can migrate, build, and extend applications on the Cloud in a swifter and cost-effective way. The Cloud is a low-code rapid application development platform, that provides pre-built, native adapters to many business systems and databases. It also gives offline capabilities that enable data accuracy in any connectivity landscape.
Continual Modernization
In the third phase, users will begin section-wise transformation of their SAP ERP system. This means modernizing a complex, mission-critical system from its core with small projects that not only have a quick business impact but also immediate, quantifiable ROI. Instead of moving everything at once, this approach brings out the challenges and opportunities based on your use case resulting in a fully optimized SAP on the Cloud.
Upgrade to S/4 HANA
Enterprises can leverage the full possibilities of SAP’s latest ERP suite, S/4HANA on the cloud. S/4HANA on the Cloud offers a suite of line of data intelligent business solutions that cover finance, supply chain and supplier relationship management, sales, R&D, and more. With the entire landscape running on cloud, businesses need not worry about availability, scalability, security, governance, and DR of such mission-critical applications. The solution provides real-time business statistics and analytics.
Tips for Successful SAP Modernization on Cloud
Before you begin an SAP modernization on cloud, take an assessment of what you have today, and where you want to be. If you are modernizing your applications for the first time on Cloud, you need to assess your readiness and what steps to take. If you are already on the cloud, consider where to optimize.
When it comes to assembling your migration team, make sure to include the right members who are veritable stakeholders in your modernization project. Include the business leaders and contributors most connected to your modernization success to get all the critical perspectives, opinions, and information on the table before you execute.
Also get a detailed execution plan that is well-documented throughout the entire modernization process. This is to make the process visible and accessible for the entire modernization team members such that the experts can monitor progress and adjust accordingly. As most SAP modernization on cloud are phased, it is important to outline who is responsible for what.
Partner with a Certified SAP Experts
Modernization of SAP landscapes doesn’t happen overnight; it involves high complexity and many moving parts. However, partnering with a trusted and certified SAP partner can ensure that you can navigate the process without any hiccups, even when challenges arise (and they will). With the right level of expertise, your expert team can address evolving issues and keep your project on track. Whether its SAP on SAP-certified Cloud, SAP on AWS, SAP on Azure, SAP on GCP, or SAP on any other partner cloud, the right partner can help you scale the evolution frictionless.
Ace Your SAP Migration Journey with Cloud4C
As one of the largest and trusted SAP partners with proven expertise in mission-critical digital transformations, Cloud4C can help you unlock the true potential of SAP and provide the agility required for the businesses to adapt to the rapidly changing business needs and customer expectations. We understand your business goals and offer enterprise-specific recommendations to execute a cost effective, efficient SAP migration with minimal business impact. Cloud4C today is one of the largest suppliers of SAP HEC, S/4HANA, and RISE with SAP across the globe.
Our fully managed services for your SAP on cloud transformation support the entire adoption lifecycle, offering scalable, value-driven consulting to securely develop and manage your cloud IT infrastructure. Our experts help migrate the landscape via an automated Migration Factory approach, blueprint the entire cloud architecture, modernize critical assets, and manage it effectively end-to-end for utmost availability and uninterrupted continuity. Our unique pool of trained and certified experts can deliver the SAP transformation at zero loss and disruption on any cloud, AWS, Azure, GCP, or private cloud paired with 24/7 support.
