SAP is the backbone of many businesses.
In fact, 87 percent of Forbes Global 2000 companies are SAP customers. Many of these enterprises are moving their SAP systems to the cloud to gain new levels of agility and deploy services quickly and cost-effectively. If you’re thinking about moving your mission-critical SAP systems to the cloud, you can’t afford to take chances with your migration.
Working with a trusted partner can help you mitigate your risks during every phase of your cloud migration. The right partner can help you avoid unplanned downtime that could impact your operations and bottom line.
Here are five qualities to look for in a managed cloud provider for SAP:
- SAP expertise
Many public cloud and managed service providers fail to meet SAP‘s strict requirements for running workloads. Ask about your provider’s SLAs on SAP availability, performance, security, and compliance. Do they offer enough memory to support your SAP systems? Can they quickly scale as your SAP environment grows?
- SAP-certified hardware
If your managed cloud provider doesn’t use SAP-certified hardware, you’re putting yourself at risk and sacrificing performance. Avoid these risks by working with a managed cloud provider that uses SAP-certified hardware. Also, ask how frequently they refresh the hardware and if their platform is elastic.
- Responsiveness
The mission-critical nature of SAP means that you can’t wait hours – or days – for technical support. It’s essential that your managed cloud provider resolves your problems quickly.
Ask about your provider’s SLA for incident response times. Agreeing upon an incident response SLA will prevent misunderstandings and problems down the road.
Also look for a managed cloud provider that has Platinum SAP teams, as this ensures that you will get the highest level of support. The Platinum level is meant to represent the top 5 percent of SAP’s consulting force; it’s a level above the traditional Senior or Principal consultant.
- Guaranteed availability
If your business runs on SAP, you can’t afford downtime. Here are five questions that will help you determine if a managed cloud provider can keep you up and running:
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- How does the provider test for availability and disaster recovery?
- Can they replicate data within seconds of its creation, if needed?
- What SLAs do they offer to ensure availability?
- How often do they perform backups?
- Where do they store the backups?
- Scalability
Your managed cloud partner should make it easy for you to scale. This includes quickly expanding their team as you require more support. If your managed cloud provider doesn’t have a large enough team, your internal IT staff will need to take on more work as your SAP environment grows – which defeats the purpose of managed hosting.
The Right Managed Cloud Partner
The right managed cloud partner won’t fall from the sky. With so many options, it can be challenging to find a managed cloud partner who can meet your needs. Many providers sound good on paper but fail to deliver after signing a contract.
You can learn more about what to look for in a cloud partner in our ultimate guide to managed cloud.