Cloud exit strategy

Because a comprehensible and financially viable cloud exit strategy is still missing from the SAP cloud offering, I published on our English-language portal e3zine.com a hint. To my great surprise, Josh Greenbaum, an analyst who is well known in the SAP community, got in touch via Twitter.

I know him from numerous joint SAP press conferences on the occasion of the annual SAP in-house exhibition Sapphire. He is considered one of the most renowned and experienced SAP analysts in the English-speaking world, so I was all the more surprised when he asked me what I meant by exit strategy and added that, to his knowledge, other cloud providers also had no such offering: So what is the point of an SAP cloud exit strategy?

Suppose: My entire SAP system is in the cloud, with hyperscalers or SAP itself. For whatever reason, one day I can no longer pay the cloud subscription (fees). Now when I download the data from my SAP system, i.e. the Hana database, I have the Abap tables on my desktop, but I can't work with them because my SAP software license has remained in the cloud.

I can customize a free Hana instance and manage the data in a rudimentary way, but evaluation, business queries or similar are not possible for me due to the lack of SAP software.

Now, when I have a tax audit from the IRS three years later, I'm empty-handed: The data, including Hana itself, is on my hard drive, but I don't have any software to access it and create evaluations.

If I hadn't gone to the cloud, I would still have the software itself on my hard drive with a valid license, of course no longer maintained and up to date because I haven't been able to pay a maintenance fee for three years - but I can still use the software to view, print, evaluate the old data.

There is a lack of a cloud exit strategy in the SAP scene, so that even after I leave the cloud system, I can still analyze and prepare my data for the tax authorities, for example. There are companies that have been working on a bankruptcy for over ten years and are therefore still alive from the perspective of the bankruptcy trustee.

Here, the administrator is fully dependent on a functioning SAP system. A simple on-prem SAP system without a maintenance contract but with a valid license is sufficient for this.

Cloud computing would only work if a sponsor could be found to continue to pay for the cloud subscription until final settlement and the expiration of all legal deadlines, right?