Many busi­ness­es are mov­ing and oper­at­ing some, even a major­i­ty, of their cor­po­rate infra­struc­ture in the cloud. Accord­ing to the ana­lysts at Gart­ner, ​“by 2020, a cor­po­rate ​‘no-cloud’ pol­i­cy will be as rare as a ​‘no-inter­net’ pol­i­cy is today.”

Sub­stan­tial ben­e­fits of cloud migra­tion include reduced IT costs, improved ser­vice qual­i­ty, and enhanced sys­tem per­for­mance. So, it makes sense that cor­po­rate encour­age­ment for SAP cloud migra­tion will only con­tin­ue to grow.

Fre­quent­ly, com­pa­nies may not ini­tial­ly real­ize many cloud com­put­ing ben­e­fits when they migrate their SAP sys­tems to the cloud. Mul­ti­ple unex­pect­ed and expen­sive chal­lenges can arise through­out the migra­tion process. Plagu­ing both enter­prise IT oper­a­tions and man­aged ser­vice providers (MSPs), these chal­lenges can trans­form a prac­ti­cal and prof­itable project into a dis­rup­tive and daunt­ing endeav­or. Here are the three major chal­lenges to watch for.

1. Incon­sis­tent Standards

One hur­dle SAP cus­tomers need to jump when migrat­ing SAP sys­tems to (and oper­at­ing them in) the cloud is incon­sis­tent standards.

Using one of the major infra­struc­ture as a ser­vice (laaS) providers — AWS, Google Cloud Plat­form, Azure, and oth­ers — offers a wide range of strengths and poten­tial pit­falls as they’re equipped with a vari­ety of capa­bil­i­ties and tools. Incon­sis­tent cloud stan­dards can quick­ly sow con­fu­sion for IT oper­a­tors or MSPs that man­age hybrid and/​or mul­ti­cloud envi­ron­ments.

Usu­al­ly, SAP migra­tions to the cloud, at least in their ini­tial stages, are hybrid. These hybrid migra­tions com­bine the lega­cy on-premise sys­tems with those migrat­ed to the cloud. In some cas­es, mul­ti­ple cloud providers are involved with the migrat­ed cloud sys­tems. Using a sep­a­rate tool for each envi­ron­ment (dif­fer­ent clouds and on-premise) will nat­u­ral­ly pro­duce con­fu­sion and incon­sis­tent man­age­ment and mon­i­tor­ing. This can poten­tial­ly result in gross inef­fi­cien­cies, or even worse, failures.

2. Lack of Visibility

Regard­less of whether a busi­ness is run­ning its SAP sys­tems com­plete­ly in the cloud or using a hybrid solu­tion, a crip­pling lack of land­scape vis­i­bil­i­ty and insights around SAP sys­tem per­for­mance can hap­pen for IT oper­a­tors and MSPs when they rely on the cloud provider’s default mon­i­tor­ing tools. These default tools are great­ly lim­it­ed because they only pro­vide per­for­mance met­rics on the cloud provider’s vir­tu­al machines, oper­at­ing sys­tems, and data­bas­es. They offer no vis­i­bil­i­ty into crit­i­cal SAP sys­tem per­for­mance met­rics, such as work process­es, busi­ness process, batch jobs, IDocs, PI com­mu­ni­ca­tion, and so on.

Try­ing to iden­ti­fy the source of an issue affect­ing sys­tem per­for­mance becomes cum­ber­some when users need to switch between dif­fer­ent tools. Insuf­fi­cient vis­i­bil­i­ty leads to fur­ther exas­per­a­tion when orga­ni­za­tions run entire SAP land­scapes across mul­ti­ple cloud providers. The inabil­i­ty to see the com­plete cross-plat­form land­scape per­for­mance increas­es mon­i­tor­ing com­plex­i­ty and pro­duces an error-prone environment.

With no cross-envi­ron­ment vis­i­bil­i­ty, it becomes prac­ti­cal­ly impos­si­ble to do accu­rate plan­ning and bud­get­ing for cloud and infra­struc­ture resources.

3. High­er Expens­es Than Expect­ed Due to Inef­fi­cient Scaling

Unex­pect­ed costs plague SAP cus­tomers when migrat­ing to the cloud. A major fac­tor is that oper­at­ing costs can bal­loon when SAP sys­tems are inef­fi­cient­ly man­u­al­ly scaled. A dynam­ic cloud sys­tem effi­cient­ly scales either up, down, in, or out to han­dle the grow­ing or dimin­ish­ing resources required to meet the system’s busi­ness demands.

Prop­er­ly and auto­mat­i­cal­ly scal­ing SAP sys­tems in the cloud is para­mount to min­i­mize oper­at­ing costs and ensure user sat­is­fac­tion, due to opti­mal sys­tem func­tion­al­i­ty. Inef­fi­cient­ly scal­ing SAP sys­tems host­ed on pay-as-you-use cloud envi­ron­ments can sky­rock­et oper­a­tion costs, as you’ll be run­ning the sys­tem con­sis­tent­ly in max­i­mum capac­i­ty. While mak­ing sure your peak per­for­mance needs are cov­ered, you won’t be able to scale down when those resources are unnecessary.

The inabil­i­ty to add an appli­ca­tion serv­er to a cloud envi­ron­ment on the fly hin­ders the flex­i­bil­i­ty of the SAP sys­tem to respond auto­mat­i­cal­ly and quick­ly enough to sup­port high-per­for­mance require­ments. By the same token, iden­ti­fy­ing which cloud resources are not need­ed and dynam­i­cal­ly turn­ing them off is essen­tial to achiev­ing low oper­a­tional cost. For instance, the inabil­i­ty to prop­er­ly scale down HR func­tion­al­i­ties on week­ends when their use is usu­al­ly low will erode the pro­ject­ed cost sav­ings that par­tial­ly jus­ti­fied the orig­i­nal cloud migra­tion project. With­out the capa­bil­i­ty to auto­mat­i­cal­ly scale, the once-envi­sioned lean and dynam­ic SAP cloud sys­tem can eas­i­ly trans­form into a bal­ance sheet albatross.

Both auto­mat­ed cloud scal­a­bil­i­ty and land­scapewide vis­i­bil­i­ty are essen­tial to run SAP sys­tems effec­tive­ly and eco­nom­i­cal­ly on the cloud.

Inter­est­ed in learn­ing more about SAP in the cloud? Watch our cloud web­casts on demand or read our ASUG research recap on 10 Things to Know About the Cloud. Addi­tion­al­ly, we wel­come all ASUG mem­bers to sub­mit their ideas for blog posts they want to write.