Migrating to the cloud allows companies, and specifically those that operate their business on SAP, to benefit from reduced maintenance times and faster upgrades, but also from the agility of the model, and this generates cost efficiencies, productivity and innovation. This last point is the focus of this article.
In our last post, we summarized the main findings of a study by Syntax and the SAP Users Group in the United States. One of the findings of this year’s edition is that, as we explained, the need to innovate is one of the factors driving migrations.
However, any organization expects and wants that journey to be easy and, at the same time, to go in the right direction. They will be more likely to take advantage of the innovation that the cloud brings if they follow these three tips.
1. Keep costs in mind
One of the factors that drive a company to innovate is cost reduction, so it’s an issue that will always have to be in the spotlight, both when migrating and when trying to innovate, because small costs add up. So you need to be clear about the benefits of innovations, and how these correlate to cost savings and time value.
It will help to work with a reliable vendor who understands the SAP environment so that you can get the most out of your cloud investment, while helping to keep costs under management. And, in this, it is critical to have visibility into and understanding of all the variables that influence this. From our perspective, this is achieved with FinOps, a methodology that combines best practices, standardized processes and training applied to cost management.
2. Achieving a satisfactory experience with the cloud provider
According to the study conducted by Syntax and ASUG, SAP customers need clear pricing models and good support, as well as easy integration between SAP and non-SAP applications, which will be key when working with a cloud provider.
In our view, Amazon Web Services, which has more than 5,000 SAP customers in the cloud, has done a good job of meeting these needs and has developed native services to provide companies with tools that improve productivity and drive innovation.
In addition, it is important to highlight SAP MAP, the AWS Migration Acceleration Program for SAP, which brings together a set of methodologies and best practices, tools and resources that facilitate the execution of this type of project. In addition, it comes with financial incentives.
Not only the cloud platform chosen is essential, but also the partner, who must be a specialist in both environments to provide advice and project execution capabilities, as well as solutions that help optimize investments, such as our CxLink Document solution, an AWS SDK for ABAP language that allows connecting our customers’ on-premise SAP systems directly to AWS services.
3. Sharing the benefits of innovating with the cloud
Both cloud platforms and integrators specializing in the model should communicate more about the benefits of innovation in areas such as the ease of scaling workloads, improvements in aligning IT with the company’s strategic objectives, and the speed of deployment and delivery of services. This helps to generate more innovation.
Our company understands the challenges of the cloud journey and we emphasize the different options to leverage the benefits. To learn more, you can consult our cloud migration services and success stories.