Why SAP on Azure?

Customers are demanding more and more flexibility at lower and lower costs while maintaining innovation and quality. The constantly updating range of functions offered by cloud providers gives customers new options virtually overnight, most of which are included in the existing subscription.

A global presence of data center capacity and continuous investment in new regions and countries guarantee maximum flexibility for customers.

This approach can also be used when deploying SAP products of any kind, as the Microsoft Azure Cloud is now present in 50 regions, including Germany.

By moving SAP workloads to the Microsoft Azure Cloud, monetary benefits can now be achieved in terms of infrastructure and operating costs. However, in the discussion about the profitability of Azure cloud usage, the resulting cost savings have long ceased to be a central topic when it comes to the buzzword SAP on Azure.

Rather, it is a matter of opening up the possibility of being able to map the entire SAP infrastructure with a significant increase in flexibility and scalability.

In addition to moving on-premises workloads to the cloud, customers benefit from the platform capabilities (PaaS) of an Azure cloud, such as BigData Analytics, AI and Machine Learning, HPC, Office365 or MS-SQL.

An increase in the productivity of a cloud-based SAP infrastructure results from the possibility of scaling it according to requirements. This means that the deployment of SAP applications in the Azure Cloud in particular offers the advantage of making the resources required for this available in an agile manner.

This means that in a peak load scenario, computing resources can be scaled up appropriately based on the requirements and simply scaled down again during idle periods.

Whereas with classic on-premise hosting the sizing of IT resources had to be generously selected for the event of a peak load, in the Azure Cloud only the portion of the cloud resources actually required is ever used and invoiced.

This flexibility can be an advantage, especially in the SAP environment, when it comes to managing a 3-system landscape with a development, quality and production system in line with requirements.

For example, it can be a profitable solution to commission various development systems and claim them on the invoice only when they are actually used, and to use the pay-as-you-go principle.

When deploying business-critical applications, it is always important to clarify how they can be guaranteed to operate with maximum availability. In Microsoft Azure, the answer is Availability Zones.

An Availability Zone describes a completely isolated location within an Azure region, which is characterized by a redundant supply of power, cooling and networks.

Consequently, in the event of a disaster, SAP applications can be restarted immediately in a location within a defined availability zone, thus guaranteeing high availability.

Due to the continuous development of cloud services in the Microsoft Azure environment, the customer benefits from the latest technologies and thus has investment security and does not have to worry about expiring hardware.

Driven by changing software requirements due to e.g. the new Hana in-memory database and the massive growth of data, the internal IT infrastructure has to face ever shorter innovation cycles.

Where hardware infrastructure could be used for five to seven years in the past, you now have to reckon with an average of three years.

Together to the goal

In December of last year, Microsoft and SAP presented their joint cloud strategy. Microsoft stated that SAP S/4 Hana will be implemented in Azure for its internal financial processes. SAP will also migrate business-critical systems to the Azure cloud.

The SAP Hana Enterprise Cloud (HEC) will also be provided on Azure in the future. Together, SAP and Microsoft will help other companies make the most of running SAP applications in the cloud.

Certified solutions

Even though the first steps with SAP on Azure usually involve SAP test and development environments, it is worth looking at the availability of certified solutions in terms of production environments with the appropriate level of support.

SAP Business Suite/SAP NetWeaver: Various virtual machines are available for SAP Business Suite/SAP NetWeaver, which can be run with Windows as well as Suse Linux Enterprise Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Industry-leading virtual machine SLAs of 99.9 percent availability for a single VM and 99.95 percent availability for VMs in an availability group also provide an optimal foundation for mission-critical applications.

Hana: M-Series virtual computers, optimized for SAP Hana, offer the ability to scale up to 128 virtual CPUs and 3.8 Tebibytes (TiB) of RAM.

In addition, there is the option of scaling up to 20 TiB for a single node with so-called "SAP Hana Large Instances" and up to 60 TiB for horizontal scaling of multiple nodes. If these instances are operated in a high-availability pair, an SLA of 99.99 percent is guaranteed.

S/4 Hana and SAP BW/4 Hana: Both SAP S/4 Hana greenfield implementations and migrations from SAP Business Suite to SAP S/4 Hana can be realized with Microsoft Azure. For the setup of this solution, a choice can also be made between certified virtual machines (e.g. GS5) or Hana Large Instances. SLES or RHEL again serve as operating systems.

Hybris/Business One: Maximum flexibility can be achieved for SAP Hybris and SAP Business One solutions by using an on-demand VM infrastructure from Azure to scale up the number of VMs currently needed in minutes. Cost-efficient business models can be mapped via automation when provisioning or shutting down VMs.

Security, compliance and data protection

In addition to pure functionality, scalability and readyness for SAP applications, the Microsoft Azure platform with its Trust Center offers a wealth of certificates, auditing and compliance. Products are ready for almost any industry requirement and comprehensive reports and certificates can be provided.

Microsoft has extensive data protection and privacy expertise and is committed to complying with the EU-US Privacy Shield and the EU Standard Contractual Clauses.