Why Do I Deploy SAP System on the Cloud?

Challenges met by enterprises in SAP applications and industry solutions:

• High costs: The investment in SAP application servers and HANA servers is too high. Costs for equipment room, electricity, and O&M increase year by year. For enterprises, both initial and future investments are too high.
• Complex O&M: O&M of SAP systems and hardware needs to be performed by a professional O&M team to analyze and resolve problems in real time. For many enterprises, costs for maintaining a dedicated team are too high and the input/output ratio is too low.
• Low resource utilization and total cost of ownership (TCO): Enterprises have a large number of SAP development, test, and training systems, leading to scattered resources, low utilization, and repeated investment. In addition, enterprises purchase traditional servers based on the data volume in the next three years. However, the resource utilization is low (about 20%), causing serious resource waste and increasing TCO.
• Slow capacity expansion: When enterprises find that the server resources cannot meet their requirements, they need to purchase additional hardware, plan the system shutdown window, and stop the production system. Data migration between servers is required for capacity expansion, which adversely affects enterprise services.
• Long delivery period: It usually takes one to two months from order placing to goods arrival for purchasing traditional hardware, which greatly prolongs the entire SAP project delivery period.
• Poor flexibility: In daily use of SAP systems, business departments often need to test the data of the production system. Traditionally server procurement, system installation, and data copy often take weeks or even months, prolonging the progress.
• Low data center security: In traditional equipment rooms, security policies, access control, power protection, temperature and humidity control, water supply and drainage, ESD prevention, and security zone division cannot be fully perfected. In addition, enterprises cannot have a dedicated security team to ensure the security of the entire system and data.
• Weak service continuity mechanisms and data security: The uninterruptible running of application systems is intensely demanded because more and more work relies on the assistance of IT systems. Hardware and software failures, single points of failure (SPOFs), natural disasters, or even system downtime for planned maintenance, may adversely affect service running and data security. How to ensure service continuity and data security is a big challenge faced by IT systems.

Advantages of migrating enterprise systems to the cloud:

• On-demand use and lower costs: Enterprises do not need to invest too much at a time for future use and can buy resources required in recent months, ensuring the maximum resource utilization and achieving the lowest TCO.
• Simple capacity expansion: Capacity expansion on the cloud is much easier. Deploying SAP systems on the cloud can fully use unlimited resources on the cloud and expand capacity with the increase of data volume without adversely affecting the running key enterprise services.
• Flexibility: Cloud computing provides enterprises with more flexibility. Enterprises can determine whether services need to be added based on their requirements and scale up or down services as required conveniently, maximizing service utilization. In addition, for temporary service test requirements, SAP systems on the cloud can be purchased on demand for quick deployment to adapt to the changing enterprise business requirements.
• Professional O&M: All hardware and equipment room O&M are performed by the professional O&M team of cloud vendors. Enterprises can focus on enterprise service innovation and IT digital transformation.
• Shortened project period: One-click environment provisioning can be implemented on the cloud. Enterprises do not need to wait for a long period for hardware procurement, which greatly shortens the overall SAP project period.
• Security: Cloud vendors have security O&M teams dedicated to data center security policies, access control, power protection, temperature and humidity control, water supply and drainage, ESD prevention, and security zone division, meeting national security standards and ensuring the security of the overall system and data.