Some statistics claim migrating your SAP applications to AWS Cloud brings down infrastructure costs by 30%. Is this true?

Also, is cost the only business driver behind migrating SAP applications onto AWS?

In this ever-evolving business era, companies need to be innovative to stay relevant. And to be innovative, businesses need to be agile, flexible and adaptable. Their core business platform needs to support innovation.

However, often, business needs that require  innovation are curtailed due to shortcomings in the supporting IT platform. Organizations struggle to move ahead due to redundant hardware, unscalable infrastructure or legacy platforms that do not support upgrades or migrations to a more future-ready platform like SAP S/4 HANA that not only simplifies ERP but also acts as the right platform to accelerate business innovation using IoT, Machine Learning etc

To overcome these challenges, when a company’s IT explores the options to migrate to public cloud platforms like Amazon Web Services (AWS) to host SAP, often, the analysis is restricted to 2 key factors:

1. Suitability of existing SAP and non-SAP applications to migrate to AWS
2. Direct cost comparison between hosting charges of SAP applications on AWS vs on-premise

While the suitability of applications is a critical decision factor before migrating any application to cloud, a direct one-to-one comparison between on-premise vs cloud operating costs over a 3-or-5-year period can be misleading.

That leads us to the original question of this article - Does migrating SAP applications to AWS really save costs?

The cost dimensions of SAP migration to cloud

During cloud assessment exercises, we often  observe a TCO reduction by just migrating SAP applications onto cloud. However, this does not give a complete picture of the involved cost benefits.

When SAP landscapes are migrated like-to-like to Cloud, often they are not ‘right-sized’ for AWS, the flexibility to modify Instances as per actual utilization at will is not taken into account, the ability to scale-up and down based on load, both, horizontally and vertically, is not factored in.

Companies that adapt their SAP and Infra administration by utilizing the right tools and automation that can provide this flexibility and scalability  tend to achieve true cost benefits of public cloud migration. These are indirect cost savings that are often not taken into account during a cloud assessment exercise and are not realized unless the right tools are utilized to manage SAP applications on public cloud

So, how can you achieve these indirect cost savings and realize the true potential of SAP cloud migration and at the same time ensure that the chosen Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform supports innovation.

Realizing the true potential of SAP migration to AWS

SAP and AWS have collaborated since 2011 to certify AWS for production deployments of SAP applications, platforms, and databases. AWS offers a broad set of native cloud services, spanning traditional services like compute, storage, and databases, as well as emerging technologies like IoT and machine learning on top of a reliable global infrastructure.

On top, Wipro brings in its AWS-specific tools suite for SAP that helps in seamlessly migrating SAP applications to AWS and automate day-to-day maintenance operations of the SAP landscape. These tools help companies realize significant SAP infra cost savings over the one-time cost reduction achieved by migrating to cloud.

Wipro’s tools set for SAP on AWS helps in every stage of an organization’s SAP journey onto AWS:

Tools for migration

Cloud Studio – Provides a comprehensive view of the entire IT estate including R-Lane analysis, inventory, move group definitions etc.

MigMan – Assesses all code changes required during an AWS Cloud migration including Heterogenous Migrations, SAP Upgrades and Conversions

Auto Pro for AWS – Automates provisioning, patching, SAP pre-installation tasks, AWS foundation tasks, thereby saving about 30% costs during cloud build and deployment

Tools for SAP administration

WakeUp SAP for AWS – Automated shutdown and startup of SAP applications on AWS including scheduled stop of virtual machines (VMs), thereby saving costs for non-prod instances

SAP AutoScale – Scale-up and scale-down SAP instances at will, thereby allowing customers to pay only for what they use

These tools help organizations make seamless migrations to AWS and also adapt cloud-centric ways of managing SAP applications to realize additional cost benefits.

For instance, Wipro Cloud Studio for AWS analyzes and provides insights on SAP usage across the landscape and on systems that can be shut down, leading to corresponding cost savings. It also analyzes the utilization of AWS resources and provides inputs towards optimizing hardware, which in turn helps switch to the right EC2 instances and save costs.

SAP AutoScale (Horizontal scaling automation) helps organizations provision additional App servers only during month-ends or quarter end periods, thereby fully utilizing the flexibility that AWS pay-as-you-use provides.

In addition, since AWS brings in a wide variety of SAP-certified VMs for various workloads starting from small EC2 instances to the largest supported HANA scale-out deployments of SAP, companies can continue along their S/4 HANA innovation journey without any restrictions of hardware, data centers, unsupported platforms etc.

To conclude

By running SAP on AWS, organizations not only can experiment more with speed, but also get more out of SAP with the broad range of services offered by AWS, including AWS IoT Core, data lakes on AWS and Amazon SageMaker. They benefit from the dual advantage of long-term reduction in IaaS costs along with a stable, futuristic platform to innovate.

Wipro automation tools for AWS help businesses migrate their SAP landscapes seamlessly to AWS and realize the true potential of hosting and managing their landscapes on AWS.

Be it an as-is migration to AWS or transformation to S/4 HANA along with cloud migration, Wipro has helped many organizations choose the right path in their innovation journey. To know more, reach out to us at mahadevan.04@wipro.com