Not a week goes by that I’m not speaking to an SAP customer about the public cloud as an option for hosting their SAP applications. But twice in the last month customers have said they’d like to go to the public cloud but can’t because they own on-premise SAP licenses.
Let me clear up that misconception right away and say that yes, you can run most on-premise licenses in the public cloud. And by public cloud I mean AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform or any other supported public cloud vendor.
The meaning of “cloud” can be confusing.
SAP bears some of the blame for this confusion. They attach the word “cloud” to everything and it confuses customers—after all, “cloud” can mean so many different things without further description or explanation.
Watch the webinar to learn about the technical aspects of running SAP on GCP
We’re only talking about on-premise licenses.
Not included are SAP’s SaaS cloud apps like SuccessFactors and Ariba. Those are true SaaS cloud applications and are licensed differently. HANA Enterprise Cloud (HEC) and SAP Cloud Platform (SCP) are also different products and not part of this discussion.
ECC, BW, HANA (including the S/4HANA on-premise edition), and the rest of the Business Suite applications can all be run in the public cloud. Those SAP licenses are transferable to both the public cloud and also any private cloud. Your on-premise SAP licenses are not a barrier to moving your applications to the cloud.
Other considerations.
Not every database and operating system combination is supported in the public cloud. For example, older versions of UNIX like HP-UX or AIX cannot be migrated. Further, for Oracle users, you will need to use Oracle’s version of Linux to migrate to the public cloud, or SUSE. However, SUSE can be run in combination with databases like ASE or HANA, just not with Oracle. It’s details like these (and so many more) that make it imperative you have a well-versed partner helping you migrate to the public cloud.
These issues are not unlike any other platform changes or datacenters you may have encountered in the past and there are straightforward processes for making the switch. The Product Availability Matrix (PAM) is the place to start to find all the supported OS/DB combinations and the following OSS notes for the public cloud as there are a few product specific limitations noted there.
• 2456432—SAP Applications on Google Cloud Platform: Supported Products and Google VM types
• 1656099—SAP Applications on AWS: Supported DB/OS and AWS EC2 products
• 1928533—SAP Applications on Azure: Supported Products and Azure VM types
• 1380654—SAP support in public cloud environments
The good news is, in most cases, your SAP license will not prohibit you from moving to the cloud. Is now the time to move to the cloud? Contact Managecore today to disucss your options if you’re not ready to migrate to the cloud right now.
