Cloud Exit and Data Retention
While leafing through a magazine one of our talented student workers left in my office after a meeting, I saw an ad for a German IT provider. It specifically referred to a cloud exit service. I had never seen the inevitable in such a clear form before.
The discussion about the cloud in the SAP community, in our DSAG (German-speaking SAP User Group), and at my SAP get-togethers is becoming increasingly political and technical. Our SAP CEO Christian Klein has made a radical U-turn in the last 18 months: from cloud first to hybrid cloud, he landed on cloud only last summer. It seems to be a political move that has earned him a lot of praise from financial analysts and investors, but has caused a lot of consternation in the SAP community.
In a report entitled "Mercedes and the Rude End of Luxury Dreams," by German Magazine Manager Magazin, the magazine reports that Mercedes-Benz CEO Ola Källenius wants to turn the automaker into a luxury brand. But the electric models are sold only at a discount, the combustion engines need expensive upgrades, and the profit targets are in jeopardy. What remains is perplexity. A little further on in the text is a passage that could soon become a matter of faith for SAP CEO Christian Klein: "First of all, Ola Källenius adjusted his targets. “Electric only” has become “electric first”. The planned switch from internal combustion engines to electricity has been slowed down—partly due to political pressure.
Compared to Mercedes-Benz, SAP's current share price proves CEO Klein right, but politically his actions are highly controversial within the SAP community. None of my regulars are against the cloud. We all run very successful cloud systems. At Mercedes-Benz, the HR/HCM system is in the cloud with Workday after no progress was made with SuccessFactors.
I am convinced that in the coming years we will see cloud first, and the logical ERP architecture for that is hybrid cloud. ERP is a complex challenge with countless functions from the factory floor to the Internet of AI models. Each individual and unique function requires specific solutions. At my SAP roundtable, an archiving project with SAP and OpenText was presented, which was ultimately implemented as an on-premises solution because storage hardware in a company's own data center is unobtrusive and much cheaper than a cloud solution.
For cloud exit scenarios, the SAP community will need to maintain an on-prem infrastructure anyway. Some SAP partners now offer data retention warehouses and databases that are best and most cost-efficiently operated with a local IT architecture. Ultimately, a cloud exit is also about minimizing operational costs. One-time payments for hardware and licenses for a data retention database, followed by only the cost of electricity, seem like a manageable cost. This model could last for ten years, especially in the event of a shutdown, in order to still be able to deal with possible requests from the IRS and other authorities.
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