How Many SAP Systems are Required to Support Services?

According to SAP best practices, there are at least three systems: development system, testing system, and production system. For some large enterprises, each set of SAP software has 5 to 6 systems, including the sandbox system and pre-production system. This is to keep responsibilities clear. The development system is available to only developers. After all the workloads are transferred to the testing system, only the test personnel has accesses to them. Upon test completion, applications and data are transferred to the production system where no modification can be made. Any modifications, such as patch upgrade and new function development, are achieved after the services are rolled back to the development system.

All development, testing, and production systems run 24 hours a day. Therefore, customers are usually billed for the SAP systems yearly or monthly.