Good migrations, part 3 – Moving to the cloud with SAP

The previous two posts  in this series were written by Vinay Yelluri and Henrik Wagner on my new SAP and Cloud Services team at Atos. We decided to write these blogs while we were recording some short conversations about S/4HANA migrations for the Atos Digital Insights Radio podcast. Vinay spoke/wrote about key drivers he’s seeing, and how your starting point determines your migration path. Henrik pushed forward to show how this migration can lead to real digital transformation. And finally, I’ll take you through some common issues we see with SAP migrations to the cloud.

Not if, but when

Cloud is coming. It’s only a question of when. By this time, many SAP customers have already embraced cloud technologies, but some may still be deciding when and how to make the move. Some are still in a learning/discovery phase where they are trying to understand all the options and make sure all their operations are running perfectly before they move their SAP workloads to cloud.

Syncing cloud and application transformations

Cloud and application transformation can happen together or separately. Customers who have SAP applications on premises may initially move as-is or lift-and-shift to cloud, to minimize the risk and avoid disruption. Once the SAP applications are moved to cloud then they can transform their applications to use cloud-native technologies. New customers who are embarking on their (greenfield) SAP journeys can leverage the cloud-native functionality from day-one.

There’s a perception that when you move to the cloud, costs will be greatly reduced and everything will continue working as-is. But that may not be the case. It’s necessary to design right-sizing and establish proper cloud foundations, such as:

• Setting up and tagging the VMs to understand which team needs to be charged-back based on the usage and how to enable continuous improvement
• Snoozing the applications that don’t need to run 24x7
• Provisioning the VMs that are certified by SAP to run the workloads
• Conducting a comprehensive analysis of security, which is critical on several levels.

Harnessing cloud’s power

Looking beyond the SAP perspective, cloud migrations and digital transformation offer huge advantages in areas like business analytics and total cost of ownership. You can combine SAP and non-SAP data for analytics and provide valuable insights for decision-making. Also, the new cloud models like microservices and containers enable pay-as-you-go pricing schemes where you’re charged only based on what you are using. This is always more appealing than having to stack-up a lot of hardware to cover all your possible needs in an on-premises environment.

I’d like to close this blog series with a big “thank you” to everyone who’s been to see our team at SAP TechEd in Las Vegas. It’s been a pleasure, and I sincerely hope to connect again in the future!

“Atos SAP & Cloud Services team at SAP TechEd, September 2019: Henrik Wagner, Kiran Musunuru, Ravi Kelkar, Sana Asher, Christian Neumaier and Vinay Yelluri.”