Moving to the cloud is a competitive imperative for modern organizations, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) is one of the top choices for organizations migrating their SAP systems to a new cloud environment. AWS SAP hosting services are known for industry-leading innovation, high elasticity and flexibility, reliable security, and massive global infrastructure.
Further, AWS makes it convenient to move to their cloud environment with any of the potential paths SAP users currently take to get to the cloud—lift-and-shift, native deployment, a RISE with SAP journey, or other customized migration plan.
In this guide, we’ll explore all of the above. We’ll walk you through everything you should know about AWS SAP hosting services on the cloud—including why to choose AWS as your provider, specific features and benefits of the AWS cloud, commonly-used migration methods, and how a SAP-certified partner can help you migrate and modernize successfully.
Quick Takeaways
- AWS pioneered cloud infrastructure services in the early 2000s and continues to lead the industry, owning a third of the current cloud services market.
- Key benefits of the AWS cloud include: high elasticity and availability, reliable security, massive global infrastructure, and extensive flexibility and customization capabilities.
- Organizations can move to the AWS cloud via a variety of methods (i.e. lift-and-shift vs. Greenfield, native deployment vs. RISE with SAP), choosing the one best aligned with their goals and available resources.
- Working with a trusted SAP migration partner provides you with the expertise and resources you need to migrate to the AWS cloud with confidence.
Why Choose AWS for SAP Hosting Services?
The emergence of cloud computing has transformed SAP capabilities and the ways businesses can leverage SAP to enhance business performance. AWS has been at the forefront of cloud technology since its infancy, pioneering it in the early 2000s with their ahead-of-the-curve core competencies in infrastructure services such as storage, compute, and database management.
Formally launched in 2006 as Amazon Simple Queue Services (SQS), then followed quickly by S3 and EC2 and continued evolutions of the service over the next 17+ years, AWS has been established as a leading cloud hyperscaler for nearly two decades. Today, it owns a third of the market and nearly 10% more than its closest competitor.
When you invest in AWS SAP hosting services, you can be confident in the level of service and the quality of the experience you’ll receive. Further, you can leverage AWS tools and a library of AWS-native offerings to drive SAP innovation and level up the value you deliver to your own customers.
Let’s look at some of the specific features and capabilities you can access by running SAP on the AWS cloud.
The AWS Cloud: Key Features and Capabilities for SAP Users
Elasticity and Scalability
AWS is known for its high elasticity and scalability, which allow you to scale your resources up or down based on demand. It provides auto-scaling capabilities, enabling your applications to handle sudden traffic spikes and accommodate varying workloads effectively. The ability to scale in this way is critical to continual cost and operational optimization.
Reliability and Availability
AWS is designed to provide high availability and fault tolerance. It operates across multiple regions and availability zones, ensuring that your applications stay accessible even in the event of hardware or network failures.
Security
AWS offers robust security measures to protect your data and resources. It provides various security features like identity and access management (IAM), network security, encryption, and DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) protection to safeguard your infrastructure.
Global Infrastructure
AWS comes with extensive global infrastructure so that you can host your applications and data in multiple geographical regions around the world. This global infrastructure allows you to reach a broader audience, reduce latency, and meet data compliance requirements more easily.
Cost Optimization
AWS provides cost-effective solutions with their pay-as-you-go model. You can choose from a wide range of pricing options based on your requirements, and AWS offers tools and services to help you optimize costs by monitoring resource usage and implementing cost-saving measures.
Flexibility and Customization
The vast array of services available through AWS SAP hosting services, including compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, machine learning (and more) provides great flexibility that allows you to choose and configure services based on your specific needs. As a result, you can operate in a highly customizable hosting environment.
Management Tools
On the AWS cloud, you’ll have access to a comprehensive set of management tools to simplify the provisioning, monitoring, and management of your infrastructure. Services like AWS Management Console, AWS CLI (Command Line Interface), and AWS CloudFormation facilitate easy administration and automation.
Integration and Extensibility
AWS integrates seamlessly with various other AWS services and third-party tools. You can leverage this ecosystem to enhance your applications, build complex architectures, and integrate with popular development tools and frameworks.
DevOps Support
AWS offers a range of services and tools that support DevOps practices like CI/CD or IaC, and services like AWS CodeDeploy, AWS CodePipeline, and AWS CodeCommit enable you to automate your application deployments and streamline your software development processes.
Big Data and Analytics
AWS provides a suite of services for big data processing and analytics. Services like Amazon S3, Amazon Redshift, Amazon EMR, and Amazon Athena enable you to store, process, and analyze large volumes of data efficiently.
Migrating Your SAP Systems to the AWS Cloud
Migration is the first essential step to embarking on your SAP cloud modernization and digital transformation on the AWS cloud, and organizations take many different paths to do it.
They include:
- Lift-and-Shift Migration — Moving applications as-is from their current environment to the AWS cloud. This method is fast but often requires updating for some applications.
- Greenfield Migration — Starting with a totally clean slate with S/4HANA on the AWS cloud. This is often done when companies want to leave behind outdated or inefficient legacy systems and build new SAP systems with AWS innovations
- HANA Database Migration — Upgrading from non-HANA database management systems to HANA on the AWS cloud to gain in-memory capabilities and reduce TCO
In any of the above scenarios, you can move to the AWS cloud with a native deployment that’s designed to align with your unique business needs, or you can utilize the RISE with SAP program, a newer alternative that bundles services, software, and infrastructure into a single subscription price to deliver a closely guided and seamless (albeit more standardized) experience.
There is no “right” way to migrate and modernize with the AWS cloud—the path you take should be developed according to your goals, objectives, resources, capabilities, and long-term strategy for your SAP systems and usage.
Should You Hire a SAP Migration Partner?
The journey to any cloud environment can be complex—there are many moving parts involved in migrating your IT infrastructure to a new environment. Without the right plan in place and expertise and resources to support it, your business could experience critical issues that impact your business along the way, including unexpected downtime and data loss.
To avoid these and other risks and to optimize time and cost throughout the cloud migration journey, organizations often choose to partner with a SAP-certified cloud services provider. Doing so allows you to execute your migration with confidence knowing you have the right support system in place to keep it on track.
If you’re seeking a migration partner to help you adopt AWS SAP hosting services, Protera can help. As an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner with SAP Competency, and one of the first members of the AWS Migration Acceleration Program, we have both the deep SAP expertise and the strong AWS partnership to help clients move to and succeed on the AWS cloud.
Talk to a Protera expert to learn more about how we can help you transform