A few questions often asked by our customers- what are the deployment options for SAP S/4HANA Cloud? What about SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud vs Private Cloud vs Hybrid vs On Premise? What about SAP S/4HANA Cloud "Edition".
SAP offers multiple deployment options for customers based on their business model, monetary rationalization, infrastructure needs, innovation strategy and other reasonable factors.
To start with, SAP S/4HANA Private Cloud- In SAP's own terminology, SAP Private Cloud is essentially SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud (HEC) which is SAP owned and managed cloud space. The infrastructure, patching, enhancements and updates are managed solely by SAP and the customer tenant is separate from SAP Corporate Network.
Now, SAP S/4HANA "Hosting" in the Hyperscalers deployment is essentially hosting the SAP S/4HANA Application in one of the multiple Cloud Service Providers such as Google Cloud Platform(GCP), Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Alibaba Cloud and others. We are currently talking about simply "hosting" the application in terms of infrastructure. We will come to the SAP S/4HANA Cloud Edition in a short while.
Within, the Public Cloud Deployments there are options such as Multi-Tenant or Single-Tenant. With the Multi-Tenant Scenario, the customer can choose to share the resources with others. However, with the Single-Tenant option, the resources are dedicated to the customer.
There is another increasingly popular choice known as Hybrid Cloud- where the consumer could control the data and applications to be hosted locally on-premise to meet the security or legal requirements and choose to put some data (transaction vs master) on the cloud.
The SAP S/4HANA Cloud Essentials(ES) and Cloud Extended(EX) "Edition" is essentially the SaaS model for SAP's Digital Core which is the ERP Software. The licensing model here is completely subscription based (SaaS model) as compared to the tradtional user-based licensing. The SAP S/4HANA Cloud Edition could be deployed on either of the above scenarios, which are, Private Cloud/Public Cloud.
The SAP S/4HANA Cloud Edition is the Cloud Subscription software provided by SAP which offers ready to use applications and does not need heavy customization or adaptions. The software is updated regularly by SAP and manual patching is not needed by the Basis administrators.
As always, customers still have complete flexibility to host the SAP's flagship ERP software SAP S/4HANA on their own servers locally hosted, which falls under the On-Premise deployment option.
I hope this blog helps to understand a few key differences regarding the Cloud hosting of SAP S/4HANA.
