Public Cloud or On-premises? Both!

The reason for this decision was usually the high criticality and complexity. Today, we are increasingly seeing full IT outsourcing or at least the externalization of a large number of servers and applications beyond SAP. In connection with this, companies have become increasingly interested in experiences with hyperscalers, especially in the past twelve months.

The fact is: More and more customers are gaining experience with hyperscalers and moving individual systems to their cloud. However, SAP is often not yet in focus. Why is that?

Hyperscaler for SAP?

The major hyperscalers differ greatly in terms of their maturity level - especially with regard to SAP and Hana. There is no universal best hyperscaler for SAP. Who a company should work with always depends on the individual situation and the specific requirements. Decisive for the selection are, for example, the affinity to Microsoft in the customer environment and the need for supplementary services.

We see time and again that companies like to experiment a lot with public cloud platforms. However, the expectations of potential cost savings through targeted switch-on and switch-off or on-demand provisioning are realistically not given in this form in a productive environment - and especially with SAP. Hyperscalers are specifically not able to enable full scalability with Hana RAM. The often missing granularity as well as flexibility in expansion and reduction inevitably lead to higher and jump-fixed costs compared to the on-premises installation at classic providers.

However, the added value for companies arises when they obtain everything from a single source and have it managed. For users, the hybrid environment must look like a closed system landscape, with no border crossings between the on-premises and cloud worlds. This applies to the organization and the technology. And it covers all areas - right down to security and compliance.

Best hybrid!

In our view, only hybrid scenarios are currently suitable for installation scenarios with larger system landscapes, because these offer companies the greatest economic and technical benefits. SAP systems - and S/4 Hana in particular - are still very well suited to an on-premises installation and can be optimally supplemented by hyperscaler installations for sandboxes, project systems and other requirements. In the area of the many applications outside of SAP, the doors are much wider open for public cloud installations and are often only kept on-premises in individual cases due to technical or regulatory framework conditions.

The boundaries between on-premises and the public cloud world are fluid and will continue to shift. The trick is to evaluate the possibilities for each company individually and develop hybrid concepts that convert the best of each world into benefits.

In my view, this means that users can operate SAP systems with a hyperscaler with a clear conscience. However, the advantage compared to the other outsourcing deployment variants is quite manageable. In fact, there is a lot to be said for mid-sized companies in particular taking the step into the hybrid world and relying on an experienced partner.

The debate about hyperscalers is valuable. It is helping to open up the SAP world, which has been largely closed off until now. For a few years now, SAP has been making a clear commitment to the new openness and acting accordingly, as demonstrated by the Embrace initiative, for example.