When to Choose Cloud with SAP HANA

As we continue to evolve and expand the ways SAP HANA can be consumed in the cloud and as customers extend their adoption we’re seeing some clear trends where cloud is being adopted.

It’s important to note, any SAP HANA customer could be an SAP HANA as a Service customer. There is not hard or fast rule about cloud vs. on-premises workloads.

But there are certainly some “sweet spots” where we see customers adopting cloud. By lowering the barrier to entry for hardware and licensing costs, reducing the database administration needs and by letting customers leverage other cloud-based development tools the cloud lets innovation happen quicker and more flexibly than before.

Projects Needing Elastic Scalability

The elastic scalability that the cloud provides gives unprecedented flexibility to start new projects. Gone are the days where IT or development would go to their boss with an idea—now you can go with a prototype.

SAP HANA as a Service allows rapid prototyping of new projects without large capital costs, the need to secure hardware, or a help from a database administrator.

This same scalability is also helpful in productive instances. For example, in projects with high seasonality, more SAP HANA can easily be provisioned and then spun down when not in use, so you don’t have to pay for peak capacity year round when it’s only a short burst—like for retailers in North America between Black Friday to Christmas. And SAP HANA as a Service lets you pay for just storage when an instance has been spun down, so your instance persists, but you’re not paying for the more expensive compute components.

Geographic Reach

Most organizations don’t have a global network of datacenters. With cloud you can develop an application once and deploy to a local datacenter maintained by SAP or one of our infrastructure partners.

Recent legislation means that you may be limited as to which geographic locations you deploy to. And of course, deploying physically closer to your data can reduce network latencies, which can be helpful when serving satellite locations. Cloud helps address both these concerns.

The cloud flexibility provided with SAP HANA lets you deploy directly to other hyperscaler clouds. Many customers are adopting a multi-cloud approach and SAP HANA as a Service lets you develop an application once and then deploy anywhere, so you can benefit from the expanded geographic reach of using numerous hyperscalers and also avoid the risk of vendor lock-in.

New Innovations

The cloud reduces the administrative burden of sizing and setting up hardware, keeping the OS updated and so on. This frees your team up to spend more time innovating on SAP HANA. Let SAP worry about the boring aspects of managing the service. Because of this we are finding many new projects are starting in the cloud—where they may persist once productive or they can be ported on premises later.

Of course since SAP HANA as Service is running on SAP Cloud Platform you can take advantage of the myriad of services provided in SAP Cloud Platform. And you can also leverage third party development tools or services available in other providers (for example, see this blog from Google about the services in Google Cloud Platform SAP HANA can leverage, here AWS details the ways you can leverage SAP HANA in their landscape and Microsoft also offers ways to leverage SAP HANA within Microsoft Azure as detailed on here). This not only accelerates innovation, but let’s you take advantage of best-of-breed solutions from multiple vendors.

Another cool point to note: only SAP HANA as a Service lets you deploy to the cloud of your choice with a single contract from SAP, so you can easily deploy your SAP HANA app to multi-clouds without needing to go to the various cloud vendors to negotiate an infrastructure contract.

I’ve mentioned SAP HANA as a Service here, but it’s important to note we have a variety of ways to leverage SAP HANA in the cloud—checkout this blog for more details on our cloud licensing.

Find more information on SAP HANA as a Service here, hear how Epsilon is leveraging HANA and why cloud was right for them, or give HANA in the cloud a shot by start your free trial of SAP HANA as a Service here.