Moving SAP application on Cloud

[Former Member]

These days Cloud has rapidly gained momentum in enterprise environments as organizations are looking for ways to control rising hardware costs and to optimize their use of energy & resources while improving business continuity. Moving application landscape to Cloud will help reduce overall costs & increase speed & resilience.

A move to the cloud must be a thoughtful evolution that takes every company’s unique situation, below are some the challenges faced by most of the organisations worldwide with existing Infrastructure service model (on premise)

• Reduce Total Cost of Ownership for SAP landscape
• Reduce cost and at the same time achieve quicker Time-To-Market in a dynamic marketplace
• Need to adapt quickly to new business needs
• Higher operational security while adoption new business processes
• Reduce provisioning and deployment cycle for SAP instances
• Reduce complexity and overall OpEx
• Solution for a better & cost effective disaster recovery systems
• Variabilization of my resource consumption

Cloud computing promises significant benefit's to the customers as well as cloud provider's around pay per use, cash flow & speed. These benefits can only be realized with a properly designed physical data center architecture that can support it.

“Gartner predicts more than 50% of Global 1000 companies will have customer sensitive data in public cloud by 2016”

Unlike traditional on-premise software applications, cloud applications are located and managed remotely and built with customization to meet company’s needs. Cloud applications also differ in that the cloud provider, not the customer, is responsible for the maintenance, operations, and bandwidth of the software. Below mentioned are the Cloud Deployment models available on broad level for SAP application setup.

Private cloud is cloud infrastructure operated exclusively for a single organization, whether managed internally or by a third-party and hosted internally or externally.

Public cloud A cloud is called a 'Public cloud' when the services are rendered over a network that is open for public use. Technically there is no difference between public and private cloud architecture, however, security consideration may be substantially different for services (storage, applications & other resources) that are made available by a service provider for a public audience and when communication is effected over a non-trusted network. Generally, public cloud service providers like Amazon AWS & operate the infrastructure and offer access via Internet

Hybrid cloud is a composition of two or more clouds (private, community or public) that remain unique entities but are bound together, offering the benefits of multiple deployment models. Such composition expands deployment options for cloud services, allowing IT organizations to use public cloud computing resources to meet temporary needs.

How do you move your SAP landscape to Cloud?? – Here you go!!

Study & analyse customer server list and group them into logical move groups based upon business function, infrastructure dependency, data center location, and performance dependency. This will also results in assigning a criticality to each move group, and planning moves according to the risk involved, with higher risk move groups performed later in the process after we gained experience with less critical server environments.

During my next blog will focus on different approaches/processes available to move SAP applications to Cloud & will help define the right approach for your customer.