SAP is the backbone of businesses and supports all kinds of functions including sales, operations, supply chain and even financials.
Migrating to the cloud transforms the way your business uses technology for its functions and helps you use required computing and storage instead of spending a huge amount upfront to handle the fluctuating workload.
Discover the 15 lessons learned when moving SAP to the cloud.
Making your new SAP investments in the cloud helps you to be efficient, agile and innovative.
Lesson 1: Understand the migration efforts and suitability
Before going through with the migration, it is best to assess the complexity of the SAP workloads, infrastructure, size of each workload and database and requirements for elasticity.
Lesson 2: Eliminate the unnecessary stuff
Migrating to the cloud is a good opportunity to sort the stuff and remove the unwanted stuff. If you keep carrying dead weight on the cloud, it can add up to a lot of unwanted expenses.
Lesson 3: Don’t overprovision the virtual machines
To avoid increasing your system weekly, ensure that you provision just enough resources
Lesson 4: Determine the Azure region strategy before migrating
Azure regions have a global reach. Ensure that your resources are hosted in regions providing the best connectivity for your company.
Lesson 5: Move low-risk systems to Azure with the vertical strategy
A low-risk end-to-end system might be good for testing a vertical strategy and helps you gain experience with a production environment in Azure.
Lesson 6: Consider building new systems from the start in Azure
Consider building low-business new impact systems in Azure. This can help you save money and learn about production environments in Azure.
Lesson 7: Understand migration strategies and how to best apply them to your environment
Having a good migration strategy is an important part of moving SAP to Azure. It is essential to understand when. what and where to move.
Lesson 8: Predict the known business events
Don’t move highly critical systems right away and schedule around major events like financial reporting, product releases or any other important projects that will go live in the production environment.
Lesson 9: Monitor the advances in technology
Azure technology and virtual machine sizes and features are always advancing. Stay updated on new capabilities and make use of the best advances to get maximum benefits for your business.
Lesson 10: Optimize your SAP environment before and after moving to Azure
Ensure that retired systems aren’t being migrated, SAP infrastructure inventory is accurate and a disaster recovery plan is in place before migrating.
Lesson 11: Design for high availability in the production systems
You can design for high availability in the production systems by using Windows Server Failover Clustering, SQL Server and SAP features.
Lesson 12: Use the Snooze
You can reduce costs by using one of the cloud’s best benefits: snooze your usage of Azure when your teams are not working.
Lesson 13: Prioritize security
When moving SAP to Azure, check all the compliance and data security aspects of hosting data in the public cloud to ensure maximum security.
Lesson 14: Balance security needs with troubleshoot
Consider how to balance security with the ability to troubleshoot. Open only the necessary ports to help with troubleshooting.
Lesson 15: Get hold of all application and data legal requirements during planning
Compliance with legal requirements for data security and safety can be complicated. Therefore, it is best to work with the stakeholders and data owners of all applications to ensure all corporate and legal compliance needs.
