It’s unde­ni­able that this year has been unlike any oth­er in recent mem­o­ry. The reper­cus­sions of COVID-19 extend into every cor­ner of your busi­ness and the appli­ca­tions that run it. Last month, SAP spe­cial­ists from Dell Tech­nolo­gies, Bri­an Stur­gis and Rob Mclaugh­lin, laid out the Four Big Ideas dom­i­nat­ing inter­ac­tions with SAP users as the effects of a glob­al pan­dem­ic make their mark on every­day busi­ness operations.

In this sec­ond post, we explore the height­ened focus on the cloud and the need to build a cloud-first strat­e­gy, a top pri­or­i­ty among SAP teams right now.

All in on Cloud: Why Right Now?

Bri­an: One of the major rea­sons cloud strat­e­gy is on everyone’s mind is because the top soft­ware-as-a-ser­vice (SaaS) providers like Sales­Force and SAP Con­cur have shown cus­tomers what is pos­si­ble with the cloud. They han­dle your soft­ware, infra­struc­ture, patch­es, and releas­es so that you can focus most on using the soft­ware to add val­ue to your busi­ness. There are cer­tain­ly more chal­lenges and con­sid­er­a­tions for employ­ing the cloud for enter­prisewide appli­ca­tions like SAP S/4HANA as com­pared with just CRM and T&E func­tions. But, when you add the COVID-19-dri­ven increase of remote and vir­tu­al oper­a­tions to the high­ly proven SaaS mod­el, the case for the cloud has cer­tain­ly been made and the indus­try is increas­ing­ly mov­ing in that direction.

Rob: That’s cor­rect Bri­an. The uncer­tain­ty of on-premise oper­a­tional staff and phys­i­cal deliv­ery of infra­struc­ture com­po­nents has def­i­nite­ly pro­mot­ed pub­lic cloud as the so-called ​“easy but­ton.” But it’s very impor­tant for peo­ple to under­stand that although the ini­tial spend and infra­struc­ture-as-a-ser­vice solu­tions (IaaS) may seem easy, they do intro­duce yet anoth­er silo of infra­struc­ture, with increased secu­ri­ty chal­lenges, unpre­dictable costs, and, in many cas­es, requir­ing addi­tion­al skill sets.

What’s dri­ving cloud con­cerns for SAP specifically?

Rob: SAP land­scapes, whether they are run­ning on SAP HANA or tra­di­tion­al plat­forms, are high­ly com­plex envi­ron­ments. Mul­ti­ple pro­duc­tion SAP com­po­nents are typ­i­cal, and they all ​“talk” to each oth­er. These envi­ron­ments are preva­lent among the cus­tomer orga­ni­za­tions I deal with. At the same time, there are oth­er non-SAP envi­ron­ments that con­tribute to the oper­a­tional side of the busi­ness too. The SAP tech­nol­o­gy plat­form has evolved, but we still con­sid­er this to be a tra­di­tion­al work­load. Mean­ing, a mis­sion-crit­i­cal appli­ca­tion that relies on infra­struc­ture-based capa­bil­i­ties to meet SLAs around agili­ty, avail­abil­i­ty, secu­ri­ty, and TCO. These are the typ­i­cal chal­lenges in the mul­ti­cloud world, whether you are work­ing with on-premise, hyper­scalers, or hybrid environments.

Bri­an: Exact­ly. In many ways, a company’s set of enter­prise appli­ca­tions and data — used for cap­ture, pro­cess­ing, out­put, and shar­ing — is like a big puz­zle made up of dis­crete pieces. Cus­tomers who view cloud as exclu­sive­ly off-premise and exter­nal­ly con­trolled have legit­i­mate con­cerns that they will not have the all the cor­rect pieces avail­able when need­ed to com­plete the puz­zle, because of missed SLAs by the provider, dif­fi­cul­ties in achiev­ing ongo­ing inte­gra­tion between edge and core appli­ca­tions and data, con­tract mis­un­der­stand­ings — what have you. For these rea­sons, many are reluc­tant to embrace any part of the cloud for their enter­prise needs.

What are the options for the cloud and how have they changed?

Bri­an: We tend to give short labels to the options — pub­lic, pri­vate, and hybrid. How­ev­er, options are best cat­e­go­rized by answers to ques­tions like these: Is the infra­struc­ture (that hous­es the soft­ware and data) locat­ed off-premise or on? Is the infra­struc­ture, up to the hyper­vi­sor lay­er, man­aged exter­nal­ly by a provider or inter­nal­ly? Is the soft­ware, from the OS lay­er up into the SAP Basis lay­er, man­aged exter­nal­ly or inter­nal­ly? Do the answers to these ques­tions dif­fer for Pro­duc­tion ver­sus Non-Pro­duc­tion and/​or Dis­as­ter Recov­ery instances? Do the answers dif­fer for edge com­put­ing ver­sus core? As you can see, these com­bi­na­tions result in a large num­ber of actu­al options.

The options have changed due to three par­tic­u­lar factors:

1. Increased devel­op­ment by soft­ware devel­op­ers, such as SAP, of cloud-ori­ent­ed func­tion­al­i­ty, as com­pared with an assump­tion that the soft­ware will be tra­di­tion­al/on-premise/­cus­tomer-man­aged only
2. The grow­ing num­ber of large, well-known pub­lic cloud providers that have stepped beyond just DevOps into the enter­prise appli­ca­tion space and, 
3. The require­ments and spec­i­fi­ca­tions cus­tomers have laid out to the indus­try regard­ing how they wish to embrace cloud tech­nolo­gies with­in a mod­el that is suit­able for them specifically. 

Rob: That’s an inter­est­ing point. My cus­tomers’ cloud adop­tion and the mod­els they estab­lish play an impor­tant part in estab­lish­ing an ini­tial base­line but, more inter­est­ing­ly, in the over­all long-term road map. Typ­i­cal­ly, we design envi­ron­ments to be ​“right-sized.” Start as small as pos­si­ble with a plat­form that scales eas­i­ly. This design can be deliv­ered in a CapEx or OpEx mod­el, depend­ing on how the busi­ness wants the finances struc­tured. In addi­tion, our mod­el can lever­age both on-premise and pub­lic cloud build­ing blocks and func­tion­al­i­ty where it makes sense. 

There’s a lot involved with rolling out SAP. You need to under­stand the SLAs across each com­po­nent in a land­scape before you deter­mine where things are going to land. Also, you need to treat the man­age­ment lay­er, espe­cial­ly in the SAP world, as a three-lay­er cake: The top lay­er includes your func­tion­al man­age­ment team. The mid­dle lay­er is your SAP Basis and appli­ca­tion man­age­ment and devel­op­ment teams. On the bot­tom is your infra­struc­ture team. These team lay­ers can con­sist of inter­nal staff and/​or provider-man­aged staff. What’s impor­tant is that the under­ly­ing plat­form needs to be agile, deliv­er­ing dash­board-based capa­bil­i­ties and automa­tion to the dif­fer­ent man­age­ment lay­ers. This stream­lines projects and allows the teams to focus on actu­al mile­stones with­out tech­nol­o­gy get­ting in the way.

Bri­an: In clos­ing, I will repeat some­thing men­tioned pre­vi­ous­ly, ​“cloud is not a par­tic­u­lar place; it is an oper­at­ing mod­el.” It is impor­tant for SAP-focused teams to con­sid­er this and their cloud-relat­ed require­ments for agili­ty, avail­abil­i­ty, secu­ri­ty, and TCO. They also need to ful­ly research cloud oper­at­ing mod­el options that are avail­able, to iden­ti­fy the pros and cons spe­cif­ic to them — such as com­pa­ny cul­ture, busi­ness and IT direc­tion, in-house skills and resources, reg­u­la­to­ry envi­ron­ment, and to devel­op a com­pre­hen­sive cloud vision and strat­e­gy accord­ing­ly. No two cloud options are alike but the right choic­es and com­bi­na­tions will deliv­er numer­ous advan­tages to your busi­ness. We are always ready to help dri­ve focus and engage in such conversations. 

ASUG mem­bers can reg­is­ter for the Exec­u­tive Exchange Vir­tu­al Round­table: SAP in the Pub­lic Cloud on Sept. 29, 1 – 2 p.m. CT.