Benefits of Migrating SAP Workloads to Microsoft Azure
SAP is one of the widely used ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software in the business community. In these times of fast-evolving technology, the clock is ticking for those business organizations that are still using on-premises SAP infrastructure. The cost-effectiveness, scalability, and flexibility of cloud platforms will make it inevitable for businesses to migrate their on-premises SAP deployments to Cloud. But the question arises that if it is inevitable, then how can one determine which platform would be most suitable. Microsoft Azure is the leading enterprise-oriented public cloud platform. Further, it’s long term strategic partnership with SAP makes it more attractive for enterprises to migrate their SAP workloads to Microsoft Azure.
Migration of SAP workloads to the Microsoft Azure offers the following key benefits:
Strategic Partnership between SAP and Microsoft
Both SAP and Microsoft share a long-standing strategic and well-documented partnership. This gives businesses a key benefit of taking advantage of Azure’s cloud technology along with continuing their SAP usage. SAP HANA workloads and databases have been quite well supported by Azure with SAP-certified Virtual Machines and other resources. Thus, it gives the customers confidence that SAP workloads on Azure have been well tested and thus hassle-free migrations can be undertaken.
Familiarity
Both SAP and Azure are widely used technologies in their respective domains. About 90% of Fortune 500 companies use SAP for their ERP requirements. Whereas, it has been noticed that about 80% of Fortune 500 companies use Azure for their businesses. So, this gives a unique benefit to the companies as their employees and technologists are well familiar with both Microsoft and SAP. Therefore, the company won’t have to invest much in training their employees and can begin the migration to Azure right away.
Cost Savings
As compared to on-premises deployment, it is estimated that Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of SAP deployments on Azure are cut down by a factor of anywhere from 40% to 75%. This cost includes security, power, cooling, backup, connectivity, running, along with other indirect and direct costs. Furthermore, this migration also allows enterprises to use test and development environments only as needed whereas they can continue to run production 24/7. Moreover, running SAP workloads in Azure provides immense scalability and flexibility, as an on-demand memory increase on Azure provides tremendous cost benefits compared to purchasing on-premises hardware in case of SAP HANA.
Global Coverage
Microsoft is investing extensively all around the globe to establish state-of-the-art Azure datacenters. In fact, Azure has a broader global presence than any other cloud service provider. So, location is no more a concern for Azure. Therefore, migrating SAP workloads to Microsoft Azure gives enterprises an added benefit of global coverage. In scenarios where companies need to shift business from Region A to Region B, then Azure’s global coverage makes it an easy shift.
Security
Microsoft is known as a world leader when it comes to security and compliance. Therefore, moving SAP workloads to the Microsoft Azure is for sure more secure than keeping it on-premises. Furthermore, to ensure redundancy and data privacy, Microsoft Azure offers several configurations to choose from, thereby providing High Availability and Disaster Recovery in a highly cost optimized manner with state-of-the-art security.
Conclusion
From an organization’s perspective, both SAP and Cloud are of equal importance. The long-term strategic partnership between SAP and Azure brings several key benefits, both from a financial and operational point of view. There are other benefits as well but the main ones have been shared here for organizations that are still running SAP on-premises to seriously consider the migration of these SAP workloads to Microsoft Azure.
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