Ten reasons to move your SAP workloads to the Public Cloud
Wouldn’t it be great not having to worry about the uptime, scalability and flexibility of your SAP workloads? Running SAP workloads in the Public Cloud is more and more becoming the standard over the last few years. At McCoy we strongly believe that running your SAP workloads in the Public Cloud is a good idea. If you want to know why, keep reading!
Faster go-to market and ability to try out
Lets’ start with flexibility. There are a lot of advantages one can think of in terms of the greater flexibility of the Hyperscalers versus on-premise datacenter.
Go-to-market of new solutions
Nowadays, the Go-To-Market requirement for new solutions is “the sooner the better”. Usually, a new business requirement finds its origin in a business domain. Plans are made, licenses are bought, the implementation partner is selected and when everybody is lined up to start, the IT department gets notified that Virtual Machines are required to host the new solution. And they must run on the HANA in memory database which is not the smallest asset in an IT landscape. There you have your first project delay. New hardware needs to be acquired, placed into the on-premise Datacenters and configured before it can be used.
Now let’s give an example of a company that runs their SAP systems in a Public Cloud. The IT department still gets notified at project start, but gathers the specs, creates a sizing based on the requirements and the SAP documentation that is available on all Hyperscalers. A few hours later the system can be deployed without ordering and moving one piece of hardware.
Flexibility in resources
Another great advantage is the ability to do Proof of Concept deployments that require temporary resources. With the on-demand pay-per-minute offerings from Hyperscalers, you can easily try something out and decommission it again when ready without having expensive hardware sitting at rest. This stimulates creativity to try out new stuff that otherwise would not be possible.
Flexible scaling based on actual need
Imagine you are a wholesale and distribution company that clearly has high and low seasons. During the low season the SAP EWM system needs 70% of the horsepower instead of the 100% that is available. When running the the SAP EWM workloads on the public cloud, additional application servers can be added and removed with a few clicks. There are even options to automate the whole process with functions that are available as standard on the Hyperscaler platforms, supported by infra-as-a-code.
Infrastructure as a code for faster deployment
Although the build-in resiliency on IAAS platforms is high (99,5%), one can even extend it to 99,99% with clustering on OS level and HA configuration on application level. Building such a complex infrastructure takes a lot of time and has a big impact on the running cost of the Solution. Nowadays, Hyperscalers like Google, AWS and Azure have automatic deployment scripts for such HA configurations that, with a few adjustments, can easily be deployed for your own solution. To test maintenance procedures and updates on the environment, not only the production environment needs to have the same design, but your quality environment as well. When running in an on-premise datacenter you will need to keep your hardware reserved for your solution. When running in the Public Cloud, you can shutdown one part of the cluster without being afraid that there will be no resources available when you want to test the HA solution.
Say goodbye to unplanned downtime
The availability topic is a very clear one. No on-premise environment can top the stability and availability of the Hyperscalers. Our customers that run in the public cloud only encounter planned downtime, or downtime regarding application failure, but almost never on the IAAS layer. Hyperscalers implemented such a high level of resiliency on their environments that unplanned outage is a very rare phenomenon.
Run side-by-side with your SaaS solution
Another advantage of running your SAP workloads in the cloud is the ability to run your workloads close to, for example, a SaaS solution that has a tight integration with your SAP solution. If you know where your SuccessFactors or Ariba solution is hosted, it can influence the decision on where to host your SAP backend workloads.
Benefit from the Hyperscaler network infrastructure
AWS, Google and Microsoft have their own backbone networks that interconnect with their regions. This ensures fast network connectivity between your enterprise and the region your solution is hosted in, but also connectivity with other solutions running at different Hyperscalers or datacenters.
Contribute to a sustainable world
All the big Hyperscalers like Google, AWS and Microsoft have great ambitions to be carbon neutral by 2030. Google even claims to be carbon neutral since 2007 already and Microsoft goes for the carbon negative goal. Moreover, as they operate at such a large scale and offer sophisticated functions to automatically scale up and down, energy is saved by using only what is needed.
No vendor lock-in
Usually when you sign a contract with a SAP hosting provider, you also have to obtain the support from them. With the public cloud you can choose yourself who supports your SAP workloads. At McCoy we anticipate on that by not obliging our customers to sign a contract for multiple years. We believe in the quality of services we deliver and want that to be the reason for a customer to stay (next to the fact that we are very nice people).
SAP runs SAP on Hyperscaler
Last but not least: Even SAP runs their own business critical SAP workloads on the Microsoft Azure Cloud. At McCoy we already know this, because we have hosted our customer environments on Hyperscalers since the beginning.
At McCoy, we are convinced that customers who run their SAP workloads on any of the big Hyperscalers benefit from greater flexibility, stability and TCO in comparison with on-premise solutions. We even have a Cloud assessment to prove it. Interested? Take a look here or directly contact a McCoyan!