Book tip: SAP on Hyperscaler

It is impossible to imagine a company without the cloud. Many companies moved to the cloud years ago with their first applications or have connected cloud applications to their existing applications.

The days when SAP systems were installed on-prem are long gone. Fewer and fewer companies have their own data center; systems are often already maintained in central data centers or are already partially installed in a cloud. 

The advantage of this is obvious: hardware is rarely purchased for several years until it is written off. It is much more important to be able to react promptly and flexibly to the requirements of your own business and your customers and to be able to change the server size accordingly, regardless of whether the servers are to become larger or smaller. On the one hand, this brings with it great cost transparency and influence on current operating costs; the days of oversized systems just in case are over.

On the other hand, the issue of sustainability is becoming increasingly important, which entails cloud migration and the shutdown of the company's own data center or servers as part of the diesel systems or batteries provided for the emergency scenario in the event of a power failure. 

Unfortunately, you rarely know where to start with the topic and how best to approach the topic of cloud and cloud migration in a goal-oriented and structured way. 

Simply gaining an overview of the various hosting models and what is and is not included in which hosting model is often an initial challenge. Especially as the hosting model often means that the responsibilities in your own company also have to be changed. This often entails a change in the organization of operations and the handling of change, release and ticket management, as the responsibilities change and the overlaps and communication between the providers through to the customer must be defined and clarified.

SAP on Hyperscaler Clouds provides an overview of the most important tasks involved in operating the cloud infrastructure and your SAP system. Various platforms are presented and potential users can use a catalog of criteria to find out for themselves which platform is best suited or whether a hybrid scenario is best.

The book serves as a kind of flashlight to bring light into the darkness from the start of the project through implementation to subsequent operation. It is intended to help you avoid overlooking "blind spots" that can cause a migration project to fail or put an enormous strain on subsequent operations.

This can happen quickly, just one add-in does not have to be released by all providers after the migration or an interface list is missing and after the migration all peripheral systems can no longer talk to each other because the latency has not been taken into account in the design of the new environment. 

Both authors have been advising all customer segments and a wide range of industries on cloud, migration and SAP for years. There is nothing that has not already been done. Steffi Dünnebier has been working in the SAP environment for over 20 years and has migrated and transformed many systems even before the cloud.

According to her experience, the big picture is often overlooked and the subsequent operation neglected. In her experience, the challenge and work only begins after a successful cloud migration. Cloud migration is often the first step into an agile environment, after which the operating processes and the company's own organization as well as the cooperation with the new providers must be set up, created, converted, established and lived. One thing must never be forgotten: the company's employees, customers, stakeholders and management must always be taken along on this journey, because without support and knowledge from within the company, a cloud migration and a transition to new operating processes and workflows will never be successful.

Steffi Dünnebier,
Managing Enterprise Architect, Capgemini

Uwe Zabel,
Microsoft Cloud Capability Manager, Capgemini