Over the past few years, many SAP customers were debating whether or not to migrate their SAP operations to the cloud. While most organizations now appreciate the value of a cloud migration, it is the current pandemic and SAP’s Business Suite support extension until 2027 that is making the case for customers to start building a scalable and future-ready platform. Cloud migrations are now a key business priority to attain the goals of becoming more agile, cost effective, and innovative before they embark on larger digital transformation programs like S/4HANA.   

Automate Your SAP Cloud Migration

With nearly 30% of SAP customers having migrated to some cloud platform, it is clear that cloud migration projects in general, are no longer challenging. Many customers that have successfully migrated their SAP workloads to the cloud and are now reaping the benefits of improved performance, agility, and resilience that the cloud offers.

However, the true potential of cloud, especially for SAP applications, can only be unleashed by introducing automation that can deliver benefits like standardization, accelerated deployments, improved productivity, reduced cost total of ownership, optimized scale, and eliminating the need for expensive and niche skills. While there are many areas where automation can make the case for moving to the cloud, auto-provisioning and auto-scaling provide two powerful arguments.

Auto-Provisioning accelerates SAP Cloud Deployments and Improves Productivity

Spinning up a new instance for SAP on cloud can be a tedious job as it takes at least 4 different skills (network, security, platform, and SAP), 2-3 days of time and over 70 parameters to fill in, if done in the traditional way. A template driven approach for SAP on Cloud can drive an auto-provisioning solution that can support an SAP-ready infrastructure on leading cloud service platforms like AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) in less time with more accuracy.

Cloud and platform agnostic (operating system/database) templates help to manage a variety of resources such as compute, storage, network/security configurations, OS install/configuration, user group definition, file system setup, firewall rule definition, and DB install/confirmation. These templates work to accelerate the replication of SAP infrastructure across multiple cloud environments. In addition, employing the use of customer specific Master Reference Architecture (MRA) and Blueprints (BP) help to further improve productivity by spinning up new instances in a matter of hours vs. days and with minimum effort. This approach provides a consistent replication of the architecture across multiple environments and supports an automated SAP product installation.

Auto-Scaling minimizes Total Cost of Ownership & optimize scale

One of the driving factors for a cloud adoption is the benefit of flexibility in payments (pay as you go).   However, target sizing for SAP is often configured for occasional peak workloads. This results in higher total cost of ownership (TCO) because users end up paying for all resources allocated even though they are not utilized to full capacity. An auto-scaling feature can deliver horizontal scaling (up or down) for SAP applications to manage compute power on demand. A typical scenario is the demand for additional RAM/CPU to run weekend/month-end activity like billing, dunning or financial closing. The auto-scaling feature enables users to plan cloud resources for normal usage and pay for additional resources only when they are used helping companies realize the true cloud benefits of pay as you go and lower TCO. This feature is not offered by cloud service providers. Fortunately, Wipro Cloud Studio is embedded with auto-scaling feature to enable these benefits.

Scaling with Cloud Automation

In a competitive environment, companies must take advantage of new and emerging technologies to enhance business opportunities and improve revenues. With a cloud migration, companies can achieve the objectives of flexibility, resiliency, scalability, cost savings, and security. These benefits are why cloud adoption and cloud migration have become key priorities for businesses. In fact, the worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services is forecast to grow 18.4% in 2021 to total $304.9 billion, up from $257.5 billion in 2020, according to Gartner, Inc. With all of these facts, companies on SAP should migrate and run on cloud.

Cloud automation is an efficient way to maximize the value from cloud environments. Automating both the migration and other tasks that normally consume significant time, resources, and finances, enables companies to enjoy the full benefits of moving to the cloud. Additionally, automating SAP applications and runtime tasks on the cloud provides greater ability to react to changing business requirements and more flexibility in modifying configurations, all in a secure environment. 

Wipro’s proven Safe Passage to Cloud framework along with Cloud Studio, together deliver a successful migration to cloud with on time, on budget, and risk-free to any cloud platform. The Cloud Studio is a highly automated industrialized capability that brings together skilled experts and proven processes, in a single delivery model, with containerization frameworks and operation management tools. It combines existing customer tools, Wipro’s accelerators, and best of breed third party tools, all with the goal to provide cloud migration and automation that unleash the true value of the cloud.

For more information on Wipro cloud solutions, contact  sreedhara.padmanabhuni@wipro.com

Sreedhara Padmanabhuni
Senior Practice Manager

Sreedhara Padmanabhuni is part of the SAP Digital Innovation Group and leads the SAP platform transformation team at Wipro. He has over 23 years of SAP experience working in various areas like implementations, upgrades, migrations, HANA & cloud transformations.