Azure and SAP: Fraternal Twins
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Automation, integration and quality as well as lower costs: with these ingredients, companies of all sizes want to make their IT infrastructure fit for the future. The public cloud is therefore increasingly coming into focus - even among the more reluctant medium-sized companies.
According to "ISG Provider Lens Public Cloud - Solutions and Service Partners Germany 2019", German companies have invested around 1.4 billion euros in Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solutions in 2019. This is an increase of almost 30 percent compared to the previous year.
As ISG has observed, public cloud spending is growing faster and faster. One reason: the higher number of cloud workloads that are migrated to the public cloud and operated there. In Germany, these continue to be CRM, unified communications and increasingly core ERP applications such as SAP.
Microsoft is currently benefiting most in the German IaaS business. Azure grew by around 60 percent.
"Microsoft is currently making up a lot of ground as it markets not only its cloud infrastructure, but ready-made solutions and product bundles for specific application scenarios"
says Heiko Henkes, Director Advisor of ISG Information Services Group and Lead Advisor of the study.
"In addition, German SMEs, which are already familiar with Microsoft from numerous other services and products, are now also investing heavily in the public cloud."
Microsoft's advantages in Germany lie on the one hand in the broad partner network for small, medium and large companies - and on the other hand in the driving force behind Office 365 and the desired integration of other services that can be obtained or developed via Azure.
Tight embrace
SAP and Microsoft plan to work even more closely together as part of the Embrace project to simplify and accelerate cloud migration and adoption.
The goal of the expanded cloud partnership and the cooperation with the system integrators is to offer companies comprehensive packages with uniform reference architectures and roadmaps as well as best practices to make the path to the cloud easier and faster.
In addition to Azure, Microsoft will also sell SAP Cloud Platform (SCP) components to help customers migrate from ERP/ECC 6.0 to S/4 Hana in the public cloud.
This includes future roll-outs and the migration of previous Hana Enterprise Cloud (HCP) customers to use the Hyperscaler infrastructure. The switch from on-premises versions of SAP ERP to cloud-based S/4 will be simplified via bundles for specific industries.
Customers benefit from a harmonized approach to products, services and best practices via jointly developed roadmaps with solutions and reference architectures sourced from SAP, Microsoft and system integrator partners.
90 percent of the Fortune 500 use Azure and SAP
The public cloud trend in Germany is increasingly encompassing core systems such as ERP. This is shown by a 2019 investment survey by the German-speaking SAP user group DSAG, which asked, among other things, which service providers SAP users prefer for cloud computing.
Azure was named most frequently. Companies from a wide range of industries in the SAP community in German-speaking countries rely on Azure for SAP Hana and on other Azure offerings that can be integrated with SAP.
And more than 90 percent of the Fortune 500 now use Microsoft Azure and SAP. For example, Microsoft itself is an SAP customer and runs SAP on its own Azure platform. And SAP now recommends Azure for its own applications.
The ISG study also shows that German companies attach importance to managed services, partner support and contract flexibility in addition to data center location when selecting cloud providers. This is where IT service providers come into play.
Customers expect a wide range of services from them for the public cloud transformation: from readiness checks to technical implementation. As a Microsoft partner, IT service providers should know the advantages and disadvantages of Azure and advise their customers accordingly.
According to the ISG study, this market is currently expanding rapidly in Germany. This is because both SMEs and large companies are investing in public cloud projects and are moving business-critical enterprise applications to the public cloud on a large scale.
Managed public cloud services are now also in demand from medium-sized companies.
Service providers are by no means limiting themselves to implementing Azure as a pure hardware replacement or as a hardware extension (IaaS) in customer companies.
Instead, they are developing new platform management processes through a combination of their own services, SAP services, and Microsoft Azure services.
The scope of ISG's comparative study therefore included architecture consulting, requirements analysis for the application landscape, technical design with configuration support, deployment, escalation management, change and incident management, support, optimization, and reporting.
Hybrid with Azure
Telekom offers managed cloud services for Microsoft Azure. The two companies are thus further expanding the strategic partnership for public cloud services they entered into last year.
The offering is aimed at both Azure beginners and existing customers. For example, customers can use filters to search for resources, workgroups or even total consumption in their Azure subscription.
As a Tier 1 cloud solution partner, Telekom Deutschland offers both Microsoft Azure Stack and Azure Public. This allows highly secure private cloud resources to be flexibly expanded with additional capacity from the Azure Public platform.
If a company needs a development environment, more computing power for temporary data analysis or needs to balance seasonal load peaks, it can outsource workloads to the public cloud.
This creates a hybrid environment that covers all requirements - in terms of agile development, IoT and analytics solutions, as well as strict compliance requirements - all from a single source.
Infrastructure at the push of a button
An "SAP on Azure" environment also usually needs a private, dedicated network connection to the customer sites or WANs. Telekom implements this network connection and therefore offers end-to-end services for SAP on Azure.
Anyone who runs a complete SAP environment, whether SAP Hana, S/4 Hana or C/4, in the cloud can set up the necessary infrastructure in Azure virtually at the push of a button.
Microsoft and partners like Telekom create the automation that companies need to migrate their SAP landscape or set up a new SAP application.
They offer such services in addition to Hana transitions or SAP base operations. To do this, they use Azure Resource Manager (ARM) and scripts that include a complete infrastructure solution description.
Automation ensures that solutions based on virtual machines, storage, networking, gateways and third-party solutions are completely built within minutes.
This also applies to dev/test, QA, sandbox or training systems from SAP. Other solutions are offered through Azure services such as Internet of Things, artificial intelligence or machine learning.
Those who use SAP on Azure can try out such solutions and set them up if needed. All of these are best applied when SAP data is in the cloud.
Medium-sized companies have also long been active worldwide and have subsidiaries abroad. The Azure regions in Germany and the global network enable German companies to serve their SAP users with locations abroad and reduce latency times.
To this end, Microsoft has so far established 54 global Azure regions. Of these, Hana-certified systems are available in 26. In Germany, Microsoft has set up two additional Azure regions in which SAP Hana workloads are running. The regions are linked by a global network.
Azure offers the most powerful and scalable infrastructure of all public cloud providers for Hana. Microsoft provides various Azure VM types as well as dedicated Hana Large Instances, aligned with the different use cases for SAP deployment.
Microsoft provides reference architectures that enable users to meet SLAs and requirements for high availability and disaster recovery. Microsoft and SAP are also working continuously to improve and further optimize the use of SAP on Azure.
One innovation is the simplification of the integration of Azure Active Directory and SAP Cloud Platform (SCP). It enables even more secure and convenient access to SAP services and applications.
Why SAP and Azure?
- Those who migrate SAP workloads to Azure get:
- Largest compliance profile with over 85 offerings, including tools for requirements from the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
- Global support for SAP in over 50 Azure regions.
- The ability to bring your own SAP license, reduce capital expenditures and monitor costs.
- Advanced threat protection and single sign-on (SSO) with multi-factor authentication.
- Development and test environments on a scalable, highly available on-demand infrastructure.
- On-demand Azure virtual machines certified for SAP.
Reference: SAP Hana on Azure
Telekom has built one of the world's largest SAP Hana installations on Microsoft Azure for Züllig Pharma. As one of the largest healthcare services groups in Asia, Züllig Pharma supports healthcare companies and services throughout Southeast Asia. To get the reach, reliability and speed it required, the company needed a new digital infrastructure. It decided to migrate to SAP Hana and move to a public cloud at the same time.
Starting in January 2018, the Telekom team prepared the migration of the infrastructure to Microsoft Azure in detail. The scope of the migration was very large. One goal was the highest possible availability with a capacity of one million SAPS. The dimension: In Züllig Pharma's sales department, 2000 fully processed order items per hour correspond to just 100 SAPS. The enormous capacity made it necessary to configure the data centers with particularly powerful cloud components. Especially since users were to receive information at the push of a button. In order to access large amounts of data more quickly - with Hana via a 40 terabyte in-memory - the largest virtual machines offered by Microsoft at the time were used.
With the new SAP system, Züllig Pharma can now use the faster database to transform raw data for artificial intelligence or machine-to-machine applications. Once the migration process was complete, Züllig Pharma gained access to SAP Business Suite on Hana (SoH), including immediate modernization of several applications. With Azure, customers now have access to this data in real time. To get there and move existing systems from an SAP ERP system, among other things, Telekom had to eliminate all possible disruptions that could occur during such a feat. After nine months of project preparation, Telekom and Züllig Pharma were able to complete the production changeover in just two weekends in October 2018.
Embrace: Reduce costs holistically
What are the benefits of an "SAP on Azure" solution from Microsoft as an alternative to hosting scenarios? In addition to an increase in agility, the costs for operating SAP can be reduced by 40 to 75 percent, says Microsoft. One of the factors contributing to this is that in the public cloud, the virtual machines switch off when they are not needed. This saves money because the VMs are charged by the minute. With the study "The Total Economic Impact Of Microsoft Azure For SAP", Forrester Consulting has investigated the economic impact of Azure on SAP operations and the potential ROI. For the qualitative study, the analysts interviewed four companies that host SAP on Azure today. Prior to using Microsoft Azure for SAP, the companies surveyed hosted a large, costly on-premises hardware infrastructure to support SAP. The infrastructure also requires significant support and maintenance from IT staff. New and iterative SAP releases were often delayed because testing capabilities were limited by hardware capacity constraints. After migrating their SAP applications to Microsoft Azure, companies were able to ramp up their SAP-related infrastructure faster and reduce the impact of SAP release delays on the business. Companies also realized significant capital expenditure savings by eliminating hardware, software and data center infrastructure. Respondents also said that migrating their SAP applications to Microsoft Azure significantly reduced costs by decommissioning legacy hardware and software tools. One executive said he had planned a target savings of 20 percent on operating costs for the infrastructure used to host and deploy the SAP environment. This goal had been exceeded.
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