Last January SAP presented RISE with SAP, an offer of “business transformation as a service” with which it wants each customer to follow its digital path and that involves a simplification of contracts, a new relationship with its customers and a commitment to move more companies to the cloud. As it could not be otherwise, AWS is one of the RISE with SAP implementation options, so it is worth knowing the benefits of migrating SAP, including SAP S/4HANA, using its public cloud platform.
The future of enterprises lies in their ability to quickly address changes in order to adapt to the challenges ahead. That agility comes hand in hand with digital transformation, which enables organizations to change and improve the way they work and engage with their customers.
The German company is convinced that this requires its customers to adopt cloud models and upgrade to its SAP S/4HANA management platform. Its bet, to which we have already dedicated one of our posts as specialists in this market, was announced last January and is RISE with SAP, a package that further simplifies the adoption of its management platform by grouping all the technology needed to go to the cloud in a single offer managed by the company.
Now it is the other major space in which we are a reference, Amazon Web Services (AWS), which has analyzed the implications of this SAP proposal for its customers, since it has been an SAP partner for more than thirteen years. Today, more than 5,000 SAP customers operate their systems on the cloud platform and more than half of them have deployed solutions based on SAP HANA.
The multinational, which is one of the RISE with SAP implementation options, has reviewed the various possibilities for SAP users to move their workloads to the cloud.
Paths to migrate SAP to the cloud
SAP migrations to AWS provide a number of advantages, such as the assurance of offering global-scale resources, more control over data security, and process automation that is easily performed. AWS also offers flexible and adaptable services that can be tailored to the specific needs of each company.
1. Lift and Shift
One practice recommended by AWS for initiating migration processes is SAP ECC’s Lift and Shift method, which makes it possible to maintain the application or database layers without sacrificing agility in the move. The ultimate intention is to optimize resources, reduce costs, synthesize processes and add innovative solutions.
2. Innovate with SAP beyond the infrastructure
After migrating to the cloud and once the infrastructure is optimized, companies can start modernizing their systems by adapting the different AWS services, with the help of more than 200 partners, such as Syntax a specialist in SAP workloads and with proprietary solutions developed for these environments. In fact, more than 200 providers have integrated their services into the platform and cloud service providers and has partners who are experts in the integration of technologies such as the Internet of Things, Machine Learning and Data Lakes that provide their customers with more efficiency, redesign their business processes, improve their interactions with customers, etc.
This is the case of Syntax, which has specialized in migrations of SAP scenarios to the AWS cloud and has also developed solutions such as CxLink Document or CxLink Backup, designed to optimize its customers’ cloud investments.
3. Refactoring
Another option is SAP HANA refactoring from an existing database (Oracle, IBM Db2, Microsoft SQL Server…). This option unlocks the capabilities of SAP HANA in-memory data without committing to a total transformation. It is rather an upgrade to achieve more efficiency and prepare systems for a future migration to SAP S/4HANA.
4. Implement SAP S/4HANA
For companies that are ready to transition to SAP S/4HANA, the AWS infrastructure is certified by SAP and, since 2008, the companies have collaborated to develop simplify the migration of SAP workloads and systems to the cloud. As a result of that work, AWS launched Amazon EC2 X1 instances in 2016 (the first to achieve certification to support SAP S/4HANA) and in 2019 EC2 High Memory instances, which can operate SAP S/4HANA (OLTP) with up to 48TB of memory.
RISE with SAP on AWS offers the advantage of performing a complete management system implementation, including line-of-business processes for companies in 25 industries; code enhancements and modifications to preserve customizations that companies may have made to their SAP ECC environment; expert configurations to take full advantage of cloud services and infrastructure; and the ability to grow to 10 regions the SAP Business Technology Platform.
As experts in both environments, we believe RISE with SAP is a great fit for many companies’ transformation strategy, as they will have resources tailored to their strategies and goals, and we believe AWS is ready for organizations to take advantage of this proposition. And to start this transition, at Syntax we design the right roadmap for each client to successfully migrate to the cloud.
