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Google Cloud – Blog repost!

An SAP cloud migration can be an incredibly valuable IT investment, giving an enterprise a practical upgrade path away from on-premises SAP infrastructure to a flexible, scalable, and efficient public cloud environment. But moving SAP workloads to the cloud is rarely simple or easy. Many IT organizations struggle to manage the short-term cost, complexity, and risk that come with SAP cloud migrations—and too many migrations fall short or fail completely. As a result, some IT organizations hesitate to move ahead with their SAP cloud migrations, frustrating their business partners and delighting faster-moving competitors.

Google Cloud and Managecore LLC, a Google Cloud specialized partner and SAP cloud migration expert, have been partnering for some time to modernize SAP workloads for SAP customers. This includes helping customers such as FFF Enterprises and DistributionNOW take advantage of key Google Cloud SAP capabilities in the areas of agility, uptime, performance, support, lower TCO plus advanced analytics and machine learning capabilities, paving the way for further digital transformation.

Working together, Google Cloud and Managecore, demonstrated how the Google Cloud Acceleration Program (CAP) significantly reduces the cost and risk of SAP cloud migrations. Managecore used CAP to secure major SAP migration wins with clients including Pegasystems, GDT, and BK Medical—reducing migration and infrastructure costs, and giving these companies faster, simpler, and less disruptive SAP cloud migration experiences.

CAP clears a path to value in the cloud

Google Cloud’s work with SAP customers reveals two keys to overcoming the challenges of an SAP cloud migration:

Giving IT leaders confidence that their SAP cloud migrations will travel a simple, predictable, consistent path to value that minimizes business risk.
Connecting IT organizations with skilled, experienced SAP cloud migration experts who understand how to plan, prepare, and execute a flawless migration to Google Cloud—minimizing business disruptions, and accelerating time to value.

The Cloud Acceleration Program (CAP) works to clear these obstacles. CAP reduces migration and infrastructure costs until go-live, so that cost-related risk and uncertainty are removed from the migration process.

In addition, CAP offers a wealth of technical and migration process resources to companies that want to migrate SAP workloads to Google Cloud, or that want to extend SAP solutions with Google Cloud infrastructure and functionality. This includes access to architecture templates, migration accelerators, specialized SAP-focused support, and partner-led assessment services, architecting, and centers of excellence. These resources give companies a reliable and repeatable formula for a faster, simpler, a more predictable migration journey.

Practice and expertise mean no surprises

As valuable as the Cloud Acceleration Program can be, we understand that nothing replaces firsthand SAP migration expertise and practical experience. That’s where a partner like Managecore enters the picture and proves its value.

Managecore’s extensive SAP cloud migration experience gives them visibility to potential technology, platform, planning and architecture decisions. Managecore can also help with ongoing Google Cloud infrastructure management and SAP application support. These capabilities help to protect the long-term value of an SAP cloud environment. Managecore brings the same expertise when an SAP customer is ready to make the move to SAP S/4HANA or to implement other SAP upgrades.

Pegasystems, GDT, and BK Medical wins with CAP

Managecore has already applied this formula to score some wins migrating its clients’ SAP environments to Google Cloud. While each of these cloud migrations was different in key respects, all of them exemplify the value of a simpler, faster, less expensive and far less risky path to success with SAP in the cloud.

Pegasystems: Minimizing the pain of migration costs

For cloud software provider Pegasystems, an existing private-cloud SAP environment had fallen painfully short of expectations. Lackluster SAP and hosting support left the company tied to outdated, inflexible systems with reliability issues. Rising costs were also a concern. Pegasystems was also eager to access modern AI/ML and analytics capabilities that its legacy environment couldn’t support.

Managecore orchestrated a cloud migration that brought together a number of best-in-class technology capabilities, including the ability to leverage BigQuery on Google Cloud. Pegasystems also uses Managecore to manage its Google Cloud infrastructure and SAP applications, ensuring that its SAP Google Cloud environment will deliver consistent peak performance. Pegasystems’ SAP environment is also serving as a starting point for a broader cloud modernization strategy—including the prospect of migrating the company’s entire data center to Google Cloud within three years.

“The ability to leverage Managecore through the Cloud Acceleration Program dramatically reduced the risk and costs of our SAP migration to Google Cloud. With the help of Managecore we were able to focus on running our ERP business operations in the Cloud, rather than the technical elements of the project.” —David Vidoni, Vice President of IT, Pegasystems

General Datatech (GDT): Using the cloud to maintain financial agility

GDT, a provider of IT solutions, took an important lesson away from the COVID-19 pandemic: they needed a secure, modern, long-term solution for running its SAP ERP systems. They also wanted to dramatically reduce their CapEx budget in favor of a more flexible and versatile OpEx model.

By leveraging CAP, Managecore compounded the financial flexibility and cost savings for GDT—eliminating its cloud migration costs, and also ensuring that GDT wouldn’t pay any infrastructure costs until its new SAP environment was ready to go live. In July, GDT worked with Managecore and Google Cloud to migrate its SAP workloads to modern Google Cloud infrastructure. With the migration project still underway, Managecore and Google Cloud will also lay the groundwork for GDT to adopt SAP HANA and other key technology upgrades, with Managecore providing ongoing cloud and SAP technical managed services for steady state support after the go-live.

BK Medical: Securing a platform for stability and growth

For BK Medical, a healthcare information and treatment solutions provider, there was real urgency in its SAP cloud migration plans. The company had inherited its SAP landscape in a divestiture from Analogic Devices, and the company was eager to migrate its SAP systems onto a new platform as quickly as possible.

Once again, Google Cloud and Managecore delivered a major advantage with CAP, allowing BK Medical to plan its SAP strategy with no migration costs and no charge for infrastructure until its new SAP environment went live. The migration is getting underway and, once completed, BK Medical will be taking advantage of Managecore’s ongoing cloud and technical managed SAP services for steady state support.

IT decision-makers know that their choice for hosting SAP applications in the cloud is one with huge implications—for the business, for their teams, and for their careers. Cost alone has never been the deciding factor for hosting business-critical applications, which is why Managecore’s success with CAP isn’t just a matter of reducing a customer’s migration and infrastructure costs. Through CAP, Google Cloud and Managecore allow SAP customers to focus on what really matters: making the most of the opportunities the cloud gives them.

Learn more about SAP on Google Cloud, the Cloud Acceleration Program and Managecore capabilities for SAP.

About the Author:

Managecore

We make what's complicated, easy. Our thought leadership approach starts by working directly with you to weigh the options and find the right solutions for your company. We are able to minimize costs and optimize your SAP/IT investment through our proven solutions. We're founded on the principles we call the T&C's of Managecore, Trust/Transparency and Communication/Collaboration.

Strong SAP expertise combined with state-of-the-art technology allows us to constantly watch and maintain your SAP and IT environments. Operations are routine. Issues are nonexistent.

SAPPHIRE NOW is going digital! Managecore is excited to share SAP’s digital program for this year’s SAPPHIRE NOW, where our customers can still gain valuable insights from within the SAP community.

The ditial program will included SAPPHIRE NOW Unplugged a weekly free-access video series with expert insights and thought leadership, SAPPHIRE NOW Vision taking place on June 15 where CEO Christian Klein shares the latest innovations and customer success stories and SAPPHIRE Now Converge where SAP customers can get access to on-demand digital content.

We will see you online!

For more information visit >>> https://events.sap.com/sapphirenow/en/home

About the Author:

Managecore

We make what's complicated, easy. Our thought leadership approach starts by working directly with you to weigh the options and find the right solutions for your company. We are able to minimize costs and optimize your SAP/IT investment through our proven solutions. We're founded on the principles we call the T&C's of Managecore, Trust/Transparency and Communication/Collaboration.

Strong SAP expertise combined with state-of-the-art technology allows us to constantly watch and maintain your SAP and IT environments. Operations are routine. Issues are nonexistent.

Are you aware of the SAP requirement regarding end of mainstream maintenance for Netweaver 7.4? If not, you still have time to get prepared as the deadline is effective December 31, 2020 but we encourage all SAP customers to complete their upgrade project now or least begin the planning phase to allow for enough time to successfully complete the upgrade.

So what do I need to do?

SAP provides the following maintenance options:

- Upgrade – SAP recommends to upgrade before you reach the end of mainstream maintenance to ensure the delivery of the new releases and the upgrade tools are covered by SAP support.
- Extended Maintenance – is an optional offering with additional fees and support agreements required
- Customer-Specific Maintenance – the customer continues to pay support fee with some restrictions applied

For more information please refer to the SAP note: https://support.sap.com/en/release-upgrade-maintenance/maintenance-information/maintenance-strategy/maintenance-phases.html

If have not begun to plan your upgrade project its not too late, but this required action should be taken soon to allow for enough time for the project to be completed by the end of the year deadline.

The Managecore team is here to help customers complete their upgrade project and provide any additional guidance your systems may require.

Contact Us To Get Your Upgrade Project Supported >>>

About the Author:

Nick Miletich

Chief Technology Officer

As Chief Technology Officer Nick spearheads Managecore’s delivery teams, technical operations, cloud hosting solutions and the multiple technology platforms that are used to support Managecore’s SAP enterprise customers. With over 15 years of experience, his sound background in SAP technologies and infrastructure services, paired with an intuitive business mindset makes him an ideal asset for our valued customers. Nick leverages his extensive experience from his previous operational executive management roles to be a true thought leader, working with clients of all sizes to effectively build custom solutions and deliver strategic technical support to fit their business needs. In this role, Nick is dedicated to customer success by providing complete end to end operational support including project management, and ongoing solution oversight. Nick stays abreast of cutting edge technology and leads Managecore's emerging technology efforts including an industry leading SAP HANA Cloud solution.

For those of us in the world of IT and ERP we are well aware of the push SAP is doing to deploy SAP HANA and SAP S/4HANA. This blog will examine the critical success factors for your upgrade project strategy and execution of a successful SAP HANA migration with the intent of being a technical guide for your success.

To begin its key to understand that when people discuss “moving to HANA” there are two scenarios. The first is called Suite on HANA which is essentially taking one of your Business Suite applications such as ECC and migrating it an SAP HANA database. The second is moving to S/4HANA which in addition to moving to the HANA database you are also upgrading to the latest SAP ERP version, S/4 HANA.

Note that the recently announced 2027 HANA deadline, is to actually get to SAP S/4HANA.

Key Considerations for Your SAP S/4HANA Journey

There are many business benefits to running on SAP S/4HANA making the move to S/4HANA very advantageous to get completed sooner rather than later. So with that in mind, here are the key strategies to be aware of when building your roadmap to SAP S/4HANA and helping make it a successful upgrade journey for you and your company.

Understanding Your Business Need for SAP S/4HANA

The first consideration is what is your company’s actual need to go to SAP S/4HANA. Be sure to do your homework! Understanding what your business needs are and the functional requirements of SAP S/4HANA will aid in developing a solid business case to cost justify an upgrade project. This may seem basic, but it is critical for you and your technical teams to understand what your challenges are today and how by implementing SAP S/4HANA these issues can be resolved or new functionality added.

Many customers who are running SAP believe they currently have fairly simple business practices. So many struggle with the new features of SAP S/4HANA and how they would impact their business. This is a critical hurdle you must overcome. Without a business case your project won’t get off the ground. There several new features and functions to SAP S/4HANA that could provide great business benefits to your company. As an SAP customer this is where you need to take a deep look into this functionality from both the technical perspective and the business functions, to truly understand what the business drivers to upgrade to S/4HANA are. For SAP customers, this is where you need to spend most of your time, think outside the box, understand the new feature of S/4 and validate the business functionality your company can take advantage of. As we all know going to your management team, CEO, CIO or board of directors with an investment request of a couple million dollars just to perform a database upgrade is not going to get approved. You must have a business need and justification. Be sure you understand what the business value is for your company beyond the IT function SAP serves.

To build this business case for your management team, I encourage existing SAP customers to leverage one of the many digital tools that are available online. One such resource is America SAP User Group (ASUG), as they have a many educational events and assets available for SAP customers to understand the greater business value that SAP S/4HANA provides. Also, SAP has their own value engineering team that can also help you identify where are some of the functional needs your systems are lacking today and how the new functionality could benefit your business.

If you hold an internal IT role within the company, reach out directly to your business units and ask directly what SAP functionality they feel is still missing. Ask for big lofty ideas too, anything around finance, warehouse management, production planning what they don’t have today, it may be likely some of those ideas could easily be implemented within S/4. Finding just a few business process improvements may be all that’s needed to justify the project.

Do you know your current licensing structure?

The second very important consideration is licensing. You probably know by now but SAP S/4HANA is actually a separate licensed product. It is not free as part of your maintenance costs that you pay, so having a solid understanding of the actual license cost is critical. I advise you to work with your SAP account executive very early on, so you know what cost to expect. This will help ensure you have the costs appropriately budgeted. SAP did offer a few programs where you could receive a SAP S/4HANA starter pack, which would at least help you get started but may not be all the licensing required. Be sure to find out what your SAP licensing status is today and how much it would take to secure all the SAP S/4HANA licensing required. You need to have a clear understanding of that purchase process and associated costs.

Speaking of licensing, the Managecore team often receives questions regarding licenses in the cloud. If you are considering a platform change along with your SAP S/4HANA upgrade project, know that you can go to a public cloud environment with your on-premise license. They call it bring your own SAP license, often referred to as bring your own license – BYOL. Your on-premise licenses will work in the public cloud. So if you want to migrate from an on-premise environment today, upgrade to S/4HANA and move to a public cloud platform such as Google Cloud, AWS, or Azure, your SAP licenses are transferable.

SaaS vs. Cloud

Please also be aware, as there is some confusion because SAP uses the word ‘cloud’ interchangeably with a lot of other services, SAP does offer SaaS (software as a service) based cloud versions of SAP S/4HANA. Your SAP account executive might be trying to sell you a SaaS version of the product instead of just upgrading you to the on-premise version of SAP S/4HANA. The SaaS version maybe a viable option for you, if not you don’t have to worry because the on-premise licenses are portable to move into the cloud. You will want to have a clear understanding of where your SAP S/4HANA systems will be hosted.

What should your architecture be?

Another consideration is the architecture and the underlying platform that will run your SAP S/4HANA environment. Be sure to think about “where is the upgraded landscape going to live”? Managecore sees more and more customers that have an on-premise SAP footprint today are considering the cloud. As they look to upgrade to SAP HANA they are taking this time to see if now is the right time to get this out of their data center and migrate to the cloud. In addition, they are considering the option to have the architecture supported by somebody else.

If your company decides to explore a cloud hosting model, there are a lot of questions to get answered before you start. If you have just started the evaluation process to choose a cloud provider and you’re open to understanding what those differences are, I highly suggest taking time to understand all of your options. At a high level it may seem like all cloud vendors are created equal, which on the surface that may be true, but the reality is like most things ‘the devil’s in the details’ and you will find differences in architecture availability, and in pricing models. How those pricing models actually work, which includes understanding beyond just the basics of getting a discount for signing a 3-year contract. More about what happens when there are incremental changes after the initial build that will impact costs. For example, your need for temporary servers for testing or seasonal performance needs could have a huge impact on your monthly price. Be sure to think in-depth regarding how your SAP landscape operates, with the need to do frequent refreshes or transfer data to other clouds or to other applications and all of those activities have the potential to have implications on the costs that you would pay per month.

I have spoken with SAP customers that were early adopters of the cloud for their systems and the initial sticker shock of the pricing model was too high. However, it was most likely because they weren’t taking advantage of some of the pricing models that are available, as well as they didn’t understand the architecture, so they were configuring their systems in the cloud in a way that was very expensive. Working with a skilled cloud and SAP team such as Managecore can alleviate those issues by being fully knowledgeable in public cloud and SAP architecture to build your systems for optimal performance and most cost efficiencies.

Your Project Plan is Your Success

The final key consideration in your SAP S/4HANA journey is the actual project planning. Basically, be sure you are taking your requirements and marrying them with what your long-term strategy ultimately is. Start by including the topics discussed in this blog post, what is the need to go to SAP S/4HANA, what licenses are required, where will this new landscape live (on-premise or in the cloud), and will that cloud migration be part of this upgrade project. Having answers to these questions will help you formulate your plan and ultimately dictate what your project requirements will need to be. In addition, understanding what your source environment consists of in terms of your operating system, database platform, physically where it’s located, even where you bought your database licensing and operating system licensing are vital to understand. Changing databases and operating systems as part of your move to the cloud can get a little complex depending upon which cloud you are moving to. You will want to be sure you complete the investigation phase to have a clear understanding of the ‘to be’ state and those requirements vs. where you are today. This could have a big impact on your project as the scope could vary greatly. Managecore has some customers with a relatively current SAP landscape, so migrating to the cloud is relatively straightforward in conjunction with a HANA or S/HANA upgrade. However, we have other customers that have not patched their SAP systems regularly, while others are still non-Unicode or running an old version of operating systems and databases. For these customers it still can be possible to complete the project in ‘one step’ in one outage as a singular project, however in a many of cases it makes more sense to take several smaller steps to get there.

As an example, if you’re on AIX and Oracle as well as an older enhancement pack of SAP ECC you may want to upgrade your EHP first, (which actually might be a requirement depending upon what version you’re on), then start your migration project.

Another example is if you’re already on SQL server in Windows, your first step could be to move to the cloud because your operating system and database are already supported in the public cloud. Then you could complete the S/4HANA upgrade post cloud migration. Also, know how long of an outage your business can sustain. If you’re on an old version of SAP and want to go to SAP S/4HANA all in one outage, that might be several days of just run time to get through all the steps that are necessary. That most likely will not be feasible for many customers. To explain further, if your business can only handle a 36-hour outage window over a weekend, then you will need to consideration alternatives in your project plan and divide your project into multiple smaller phases just for the outage constraint alone. As you can see there are a lot of variables that go into the proper planning of your SAP S/4HANA migration project and must be considered for a successful project.

In most cases be aware that to migrate your SAP systems you will likely need some sort of outside support services, especially to get to SAP S/4HANA. It’s rare that I see customers going to SAP S/4HANA or completing a cloud migration without any outside support.

Along with understanding the high-level project, you will also need to evaluate what type of support structure and consulting services will your team need to successful complete the project. As is relates to your project execution the partner your chose should come in with their own detailed project plan as an expert guide for you to leverage.

Plan Ahead

In conclusion, as you begin planning your SAP S/4HANA project and further evaluating if the cloud is the right choice for your organize be sure to plan ahead for success. The Managecore team is here to help you with these project tasks, we have a lot of experience in helping customers move to S/4HANA as well as moving systems to the cloud.

>>> For SAP HANA and SAP S/4HANA project support assistance contact Managecore the leader in SAP HANA transformations!

About the Author:

Frank Powell

Partner/President

Frank is an experienced Information Technology executive that excels in high-level strategic and operational guidance to help manage and grow businesses. With 25 years experience in IT and over 19 of those years specifically in SAP, his thought leadership on industry trends, process improvement and best practices at SAP events, conferences and educational webinars are invaluable assets for companies. Frank provides his past experience in developing new technology initiatives with ever-evolving innovations to grow businesses and achieve high-performing solutions at a lower cost of ownership for your company.

Want to learn more about SAP Managed Services Support? Interested to learn more about the many benefits of running SAP on the Google Cloud? Have questions about an upcoming cloud migration strategy? Looking to fill the holes in your SAP HANA roadmap? Want to know what innovation is available to better support your entire IT landscape?

Get answers to all of these topics and more via Managecore’s virtual meet ups every Tuesday and Thursday starting March 24 running through April 30 at 11am PST | 1pmCST | 2pmEST.

The Managecore team is built of SAP and IT industry leaders who have taken our collective years of experience and knowledge to put together content you won’t find anywhere else. In an effort to provide strategic guidance for SAP customers, these virtual meet ups will be facilitated by our team SAP certified team these sessions are a fun and educational way to connect with your fellow IT and SAP peers to tackle the real issues SAP customers are facing today.

We hope that by attending our virtual meet ups, it that might just spark an idea of how to better manage your SAP landscape, become educated on real-life customer scenarios and see what our innovative Managecore customers and partners are doing.

What: 30-minute educational sessions to connect with your fellow IT and SAP peers and discuss industry hot topics, such as SAP managed services best practices, cloud migration and SAP HANA upgrade project strategies, intelligent basis automation tools, the value role a MSP should provide, live customers Q and As and so much more! the series will include a range of topics from MSPs best practices, Google Cloud for SAP best practices, migration strategies for SAP to Google Cloud, live customer interviews and much more.

Where: Comfort of your own desk! Join the virtual meetup via the link.

When: Every Tuesday and Thursday at 1pmCST

Who: Community of IT, Cloud and SAP Users

Agenda Includes:
Tuesday, March 24 Introduction to Virtual Meet Up and Fellow Community Members
Thursday, March 26 Overview of running SAP on Google Cloud
Tuesday, March 31 What You Need From Your Managed Service Provider
Thursday, April 2 In-Depth Look at Google Cloud Pricing Model and Migration Incentives
Tuesday, April 7 Evolution of Your SAP Landscape
Thursday April 9 Live Migration Compute Engine: SAP Workloads on Google Cloud
Tuesday, April 14 Intelligent SAP Basis Automation
Thursday, April 16 Advanced Capabilities of HA and DR on the Google Cloud
Tuesday, April 21 WEBINAR: SAP Basis Services: Best Practices for Automation Tools
Thursday, April 23 Voice of Customer (Google Cloud Migration Success Story)
Tuesday, April 28 Voice of the Customer (Basis Managed Services Support)
Thursday, April 30 WEBINAR: SAP on Google Cloud: Migration Strategies

We look forward to having you participate in our online community and talking with you live each week.

Sign Up Now to Attend the LIVE Meet Ups >>>

About the Author:

Managecore

We make what's complicated, easy. Our thought leadership approach starts by working directly with you to weigh the options and find the right solutions for your company. We are able to minimize costs and optimize your SAP/IT investment through our proven solutions. We're founded on the principles we call the T&C's of Managecore, Trust/Transparency and Communication/Collaboration.

Strong SAP expertise combined with state-of-the-art technology allows us to constantly watch and maintain your SAP and IT environments. Operations are routine. Issues are nonexistent.

This blog post will examine the relationship that a Managed Service Provider (MSP) should establish with each one of their customers as a technical advisor. Although it should not be, I think this is one of the short comings of other MSPs and something that SAP customers should be more aware of when entering into an managed service provider engagement.

Your Outsourcing Team Should Act As An Extension of Your Team
Many companies that outsource an IT resource tend to look at it as just a simple task of assigning a job function to a 3rd party, when in reality it is much more than that. That mentality can have detrimental impacts to your business, especially if your chosen managed services provider is not serving as a strategic IT advisor for your systems no matter how big or small the IT landscape they are supporting is.

Outsourcing is when a company takes any workload (SAP being one of your most critical applications) and puts it in the hands and trust of an outside firm, whether that be a large managed service provider or a small consulting firm. Companies decide to outsource for many reasons such as not having internal skill sets to properly support their SAP systems, or maybe a critical internal resource left the company and there is a desire to fill that responsibility with a 3rd party. In many cases, companies may actually be reducing headcount internally to compensate for the costs of the managed service provider. Often times I see companies focus primarily on the operational requirements of a managed service provider versus the role of the full IT leadership that they are replacing.

Making the decision to outsource your SAP technical managed services is a critical one. Many companies just think of it as a need to hire an SAP team to “keep the lights on”; to look at the occasional ABAP dump, examine trouble tickets when an end user has an issue, or maybe just provide assistance with patching the SAP environment. However, this type of mindset in a managed service provider relationship can become a slippery slope leading to larger SAP system issues in the future. One problem with this type of MSP relationship is that the managed service provider becomes reactive to requests from the customer (especially when an issue arises) versus preventing the issue before it becomes a problem in the first place. Secondly, this model of support means the managed service provider is not paying attention to the strategic direction or the needs of the full IT environment.

Long-Term Strategic View of your SAP Landscape – Are You on the Same Page with Your Managed Service Provider?
When you think of what it truly means to fill an IT advisor role many think of an internal employee responsible for those systems. That person would take greater ownership of the success of the systems long-term as a vested company employee. The FTE would be forward thinking as they would plan to be employed at the company for the next several years, therefore they would be responsible for planning and knowing how to optimally support the SAP landscape for years to come. Responsibilities such as knowing and planning for the next major SAP release and upgrades required, understanding the true trending of performance of the SAP systems, what security bugs/threats could harm the SAP application, or if the SAP environment is running on the right platform. All of these tasks would be categorized in the role of being an advisor, but unfortunately most the time just fall short with many managed service providers. Sadly, most MSPs just think and act as an operational resource as opposed to filling those other critical roles that an internal employee often fills. When in fact, SAP customers need someone to both take over the operational control but also need (and expect) their managed service provider to be that role of a technical advisor – which is the same expectation they would have for an internal employee and also hold them accountable for. If you have outsourced to an MSP in lieu of having an internal person or team that was once performing that advisor role, you need to ask questions. Will the managed service provider be taking a long-term strategic view of the SAP environment or not? What is their approach to taking a deeper look into the SAP systems performance and maintenance? Most will say they do these things, but be sure to ask for specific examples. It is critical that you fill the IT advisory gap moving forward.

The 4 Must Haves of an IT Technical Advisor
There are several categories of responsibilities I think of when consultants or managed service providers say they are advising customers.

1. From the SAP perspective, there are many factors to take into account:

What version are of SAP is the company running on? Are there upgrades required now or in the future? Where are you headed?
When is your company planning to migrate to SAP HANA? What is the path or roadmap to HANA? Is anyone talking about it as 2025 is right around the corner.
How will migrating or implementing HANA impact the rest of your organization? Is someone talking to the business units?
Will you go to suite on HANA? Or go directly to S/4HANA?
Are there other products when you go to S/4HANA that will need to be decommissioned or installed?
- For example, if running HR on ECC today, it is not supported in S/4HANA, so you will also need migrate to SAP Success Factors or another HR solution

It is important to note that much of the items listed are functional in nature but from a technical perspective (to maintain the full SAP landscape), a lot of this information is vital for the technical managed service provider team to also understand, especially regarding your company’s migration path as we approach the 2025 SAP HANA deadline. For example the technical MSP team will need to know what the HANA migration path includes, such as what are the technical requirements, what’s the target platform of the new environment, which systems may or may not be decommissioned, will there be a change in databases or operating systems (technical team will need to provide support), what is the impact to the infrastructure that is currently in place, and so on. As you can see, there are a lot of unanswered questions that must be considered for proper planning and managing of the SAP application itself. Which without having a responsible IT advisor driving these conversations, all of this can get lost very quickly. Be sure to pause and critically think about how your managed service provider will be providing this guidance for you.

2. The second major item that is essential to having an IT advisor in place is SAP security. I think a lot of MSPs get brought in to take over managing an existing environment and whatever SAP security was in place is what they leave in place and use. However, as we all know the world continues to change and there’s greater threats each day whether it be from the internet, malware, spam, phishing bugs or any other number of threats to an SAP system – security cannot stay stagnate.

In addition, there are also all types of security related issues that can crop up as the systems continue to age. Overtime as the infrastructure teams spin up new networks or change hardware, someone (a member of your managed service provider team) needs to be going back and verifying that all the security policies your company has developed are still in place. This may seem to be more of an operational type activity but an IT technical advisor should be well aware of any changes that occurs within the SAP environment, and taking the time to reevaluate security when needed. The policies and procedures that the company have developed are for good purpose and need to be appropriately adapted and correctly applied to the environmental throughout all of the changes that continue to happen throughout the life cycle of the SAP application.
Now if your company has decided to go to a cloud environment it’s even more important to ensure your managed service provider is serving as a trusted advisor addressing security. Typically, a company will encounter even more security related challenges (or at least new ones) in a cloud environment that would also need to be understood ensuring no gaps in security take place.

3. The third item that your technical MSP should advise your team about is your infrastructure. You need an IT advisor to take on a role that will truly look closely at the trends of your environment where things are headed and what the “to-be” state for your SAP servers should be. What do I mean by that? I’m referring to investigating such things such as, what the disk capacity looks like in your environment or overall how is your SAP system performing. For example, is performance trending up or down? A technical advisor should be able to see if there is a point in the future where you’d actually would have problems, such as a running out of space – which in many cases would be catastrophic as SAP systems typically stop if they have nowhere to expand and would not be able to continue to function. However, a less dramatic and more common need is to establish a performance standard. Performance issues can creep up on customers rather quickly and one day there may be a CPU spike to 100%. Did someone just kick off a large report, or did the development team move in a transport last night? Sudden issues in performance where the SAP system could degrade greatly can literally happen overnight. While some of this may be hard to foresee, the role a good technical advisor is also being involved or aware of the other projects that are happening in the SAP environments. Knowing another team is creating new reports allows them to adjust as needed. Your managed service provider should take this knowledge from all or any new activities or other initiatives and overlay that with the current performance of the SAP system to then forecast what support these systems will require to maintain peak performance levels.

4. The fourth component that an advisor must do, is stay aware of the current IT and SAP industry trends, mainly staying educated on what and how technology continues to evolve and its impact. Then applying that knowledge to the unique complexities of your SAP environment and leveraging any other technology that your company can take advantage of. Even advising you if you should go to the cloud, and what it takes to get there should be part of the strategic conversations your managed service provider should be having with you regularly.

This is one of the main reasons I am so passionate about Managecore’s role as a trusted technical advisor to our customers and why we take that responsibility very seriously. Often times our team will onboard new customers that were previously managed by another managed service provider, and the sad reality is the SAP systems have not been modified or enhanced for years (even from when it was first installed!). I see this as a huge issue, either your managed service provider does not know, care enough, or truly doesn’t understand where SAP technology is headed – which this lack of strategic support can have harmful effects on your systems.

At Managecore our team frequently takes over management of SAP systems that are on old releases or worse yet, have not been patched in years (maybe by direction of a customer). However, a good managed service provider should be able to know and explain to the customer why that’s potentially harmful to let your SAP systems get so far behind. Moreover, if the business decides suddenly to go to S/4HANA (as an example), and you now want to perform the upgrade, you will quickly realize that if you haven’t patched the system in over five years you will have a larger project to endure as you will need to go through a whole patch cycle to get to the minimum release required to even start the S/4HANA upgrade. All of this is very much on the shoulders of your managed service provider, who should be working with each of their customers to prevent this from happening. While there is always a path to complete the upgrade to the needed version, it will just take much more effort and potential risk to your business, versus continuously staying updated. If your managed service provider was planning ahead, keeping your SAP environment current, and monitoring performance and associated trends, you will get much greater value from your investment.

Communication, Communication, Communication
I cannot stress this enough, the role of the managed service provider, should be that of your trusted advisor keeping SAP customers educated of best practices and to keep your SAP systems in good health. And when customers do not receive this expert guidance, they can become very frustrated because they run into problems. Like the examples give trying to do an upgrade will turn into a much larger and complex task than they anticipated because your system are so far behind. Support of the SAP environment must go beyond the daily care and feeding of the system to “keep the lights on”.

At the very least every month your managed service provider should be providing you with some training and or analysis of what they’re seeing in the industry. Most MSP work with many customers, so they should be well versed with what other SAP customers are doing to keep their SAP systems optimally performing. In turn, your managed service provider should share this insight amongst its customers. For example, if there is a global SAP security patch that needed to be applied at one customer then, if you’re running the same version hopefully your MSP is also telling you about that requirement (before it becomes an issue for you). A real-life example that just recently happened was that in 2020, SAP had a minimum patch level that you had to get to with Solution Manager (7.2 EHP 7 or above). If you weren’t on 7.2 EHP 7 by December 31 2019, on January 1, 2020 you would no longer be able to download patches. Knowing this, Managecore took a proactive approach months in advance to advise all of our customers they had to do the Solution Manager upgrade to avoid having any system problems the first week of January. Well it just so happened that we had a flurry of non Managecore customers calling our team at the end of year because they needed help to get this upgraded done before the deadline. When we talked to these customers, they did not know this was an SAP requirement and furthermore did not realize it was an issue until suddenly it was the end of the year. Meanwhile, Managecore being an advisor to our customers had already been working with to let them know about the requirement and how to avoid any issues by planning well in advance. It was obvious that other managed service providers were not being as proactive communicating this SAP requirement to their customers, which sent them into a mad rush and panic to get done by January 1st. Obviously, this could have been avoided.

In conclusion, being an IT advisor is not a one-time event whereby customers get access to your expert team with an initial meeting in the beginning, then never hear from them again. Being a responsible managed service provider for SAP customers entails an ongoing process built into the outsourcing relationship. These strategic conversations are part of the monthly and annual dialogue Managecore has with our customers all the time. Our customers look to us for our advice and expect that our team fills that critical role of IT technical advisor for the entirety of our engagement together.

This blog was meant to provide you with some examples of how being a managed service provider also means being an IT technical advisor, one that is aware of what’s happening in the industry, taking a critical look at how your SAP systems are trending and performing, always looking to the future of SAP technology and ultimately taking ownership of those environments. SAP customers should have the same expectation of a managed service provider that they would have of an internal employee and should feel confident in their relationship with their managed service provider.

>>> If you feel your MSP is falling short and want the help of Managecore contact our team today to get started and ensure your systems are in the right hands and running at peak performance long-term.

About the Author:

Frank Powell

Partner/President

Frank is an experienced Information Technology executive that excels in high-level strategic and operational guidance to help manage and grow businesses. With 25 years experience in IT and over 19 of those years specifically in SAP, his thought leadership on industry trends, process improvement and best practices at SAP events, conferences and educational webinars are invaluable assets for companies. Frank provides his past experience in developing new technology initiatives with ever-evolving innovations to grow businesses and achieve high-performing solutions at a lower cost of ownership for your company.

As the new year quickly approaches and vendor contracts are coming up for renewal it got me thinking about the value Managecore’s SAP-centric tools deliver to our customers. This blog post will examine the critical use these leading-edge tools and how Managecore leverages them to provide the best-in-class service to our customers. In turn Managecore customers also have access to the best of breed SAP-centric tools without the hassle of maintenance, contracts, annual expenses, training, etc. When partnering with the right Managed Services provider you not only get access to receive direct support from SAP consultants but also the added benefits of having direct access to a toolset to best serve your SAP landscape.

Access to the Best for Your SAP Landscape

I was recently negotiating a support contract with one of our premier vendors and it made me start to wonder how SAP customers that have not outsourced to the proper managed service provider are left managing all of these vendors and critical SAP tools on their own. Not only do all of these vendors have their own separate contracts to manage, there are also hefty costs associated with best in breed tools, not to mention the heavy burden of ongoing maintenance required.

From a pure IT management perspective this can become a time-consuming task in itself, to ensure all products your team has in place are continuously up to date (licensing) and best in breed to support your SAP environment (i.e. back up products, security products, monitoring tools, etc.) The value our customers get from working with Managecore is access to all of these industry leading tools without the cost and headache of ongoing maintenance (both business and technical).

Costs Add Up

This procurement process really got me thinking about how frustrating and costly it would be for an SAP customer to try and secure their own individual tools. For example, an SAP customer might only have 20 servers so they would need to pay a premium price to get access to SAP support tools that are priced based on per server charge. That would be very expensive for a customer.

As a leading MSP, Managecore manages hundreds of landscapes so we are able to leverage a discounted volume rate for the very same tools. Through Managecore’s service delivery model our customers now not only get access to these valuable toolsets but also a skilled SAP team to manage and utilize these tools within in our customer’s environments.

This proves to be a huge benefit for customers, as they no longer need to purchase a monthly, or annual subscription to multiple expensive tools. This operating expense is completely eliminated when working directly with an MSP.

The Contract Negotiation Dance

There’s also the ongoing management of these SAP management tools, and overhead associated with contract negotiations, annual renewals; each year the budget needs to factor in the expense of these tools. Added to that the on-going personnel responsibilities it takes to truly maintain all these different vendors and make sure the proper contracts and payments are always in place to optimally support your SAP environment. In addition, customers’ needs to factor in the time and effort it takes to ensure there is no lapse in product coverage during the re-negotiation period.

Software Maintenance Headaches

Another benefit of working directly with an MSP, is simply the maintenance of the product itself and making sure that it’s delivering and functioning as it should. The ongoing effort can get complex and intensify if an SAP team needs to keep track of multiple vendors and products simultaneously, in addition to maintaining the full SAP environment.

Does your internal team have the time to become experts in each of these tools? When the tool itself breaks or when an upgrade is due, the time and energy required to resolve those issues goes up. An MSP will have experts in these toolsets because they are actively working on them in volume every day.

Your trusted MSP takes on this role to ensure your toolset is always properly maintained and working in your favor. SAP customers also often use the analogy a “single throat to choke” meaning it’s much easier to maintain a relationship with one MSP versus managing several products with corresponding vendors.

Evaluating Product Performance at Your Expense

One other large factor is evaluating the products and vendors themselves to ensure you are getting the very best solution to support your critical SAP environment. Managecore stays abreast of the latest technology by continuing to evaluate and only use the very best of breed products for our monitoring tools, backups, alerts, security, etc. When you are not SAP savvy, having this burden placed on an internal IT team to have to research, and evaluate what the best tool is available in the marketplace specifically for SAP workloads would be frustrating to say the least. Managecore has already done this leg work on behalf of our customers specifically regarding SAP landscapes. Our management and consultant teams have such a deeply rooted history managing SAP landscapes, we know what is required and what technology should be used to deliver the very best performing SAP landscapes for our customers.

This even plays a bigger role for mid-sized SAP customers who may only have a few dozen internal IT staff, as it is a large effort to find these best of breed products and have the proper SAP experts on staff to know what criteria to use to evaluate the very best products to use. Each Managecore consultant has 15+ years of technical SAP experience to use when evaluating tools to know if they would be up to the task for our customers.

Training, Implementation and Daily Use of the Tool

Granted some SaaS tools don’t have a lot of maintenance required, but most SAP support products today are complex enough that it requires specific training of how to use the tool and daily care of these products. For instance, if you have a small internal IT team they will now need to take on learning the product and becoming experts themselves of how to use the tool itself, to then implement it for your SAP landscape. Buying a really expensive tool isn’t necessary the answer either, worst case scenario if that tool isn’t configured properly and months later a crisis occurs because the initial setup wasn’t implemented correctly (i.e. a back-up wasn’t occurring like it should have or an alert wasn’t properly setup), this could have detrimental impacts to your SAP environment, even while using best of breed SAP tools. Having not only a solid understanding of the tool itself to implement, maintain, and use is critical but also its the most time consuming of all. Now factor in employee turn over or new technology releases multiplied by several products.

Managecore maintains these SAP tools on behalf of our customer as well as we offer training to our customers of these tools so they can access everything we can. Our motto is “our customers see what we see” and support models are built for our customers to get the best in breed technical support and tools. I truly believe having the right MSP as your SAP partner, gets you very best the industry has to offer for your SAP environment without the headache of paying, maintaining, and learning a complete toolset.

>>> For SAP managed service support and to learn more about Managecore’s delivery approach with an industry leading SAP toolset, contact our team today!

About the Author:

Frank Powell

Partner/President

Frank is an experienced Information Technology executive that excels in high-level strategic and operational guidance to help manage and grow businesses. With 25 years experience in IT and over 19 of those years specifically in SAP, his thought leadership on industry trends, process improvement and best practices at SAP events, conferences and educational webinars are invaluable assets for companies. Frank provides his past experience in developing new technology initiatives with ever-evolving innovations to grow businesses and achieve high-performing solutions at a lower cost of ownership for your company.

The decision is final, you are migrating your SAP systems to the public cloud, simple right?… Maybe. Do you really know what need to migrate? Well, what servers and applications make up your SAP landscape? Do you have accurate SAP landscape diagrams that you can trust, and do they tell the whole story about how traffic and data move in or out of your current environment? Is the whole environment moving or just a portion of it, and are your moving more than just systems that you consider to be part of the SAP landscape? What about networking and security? These are just a few of the many questions that will make you lose sleep as you begin planning your cloud migration. This blog post will explore answers to all of these questions and more to ensure your SAP migration to the cloud is smooth.

Where to Start – Your Current SAP Infrastructure

If you’ve already thought about all these things and have this information prepared, then you get a gold star! If you haven’t secured answers to these questions, make sure that you are start talking with your SAP technical and functional teams in additional to your IT infrastructure and network teams as soon as possible.

If you are migrating out of a data center that you don’t own, ensure that you have notified your hosting provider ASAP so the shell shock of them losing your hosting business has a chance to wear off. This is a critical step that must be done so that contractual details can be worked out and resources from your hosting partner can be scheduled to support your migration project. Breaking up is hard to do, but you’ll be better for it!

Now, ask yourself how much help you’re going to need to pull off a project of this magnitude. If you’re hosting your systems on-premise, you are already focused on hosting servers and all the good stuff that goes with that responsibility. Things like, SLAs, DevOps, backups, Disaster Recovery, High Availability, and the list goes on. However, does your infrastructure team have the necessary training and gumption to migrate and support your company’s most critical SAP applications into the public cloud? If you aren’t already hosting your systems on-premise or the answer to this question is “No” or “Hmm…” then it would be a good idea to start talking to a certified public cloud partner like Managecore.

Where does Your SAP Basis Support Factor in?

Ok you’ve thought about infrastructure, now what about SAP Basis? Did your previous hosting provider also provide SAP Basis managed services and are you losing those services? The same question applies… does your SAP Basis team have the necessary and certified training to migrate and support your company’s most critical SAP applications into the public cloud? Managecore’s expertise offers a unique pairing of cloud and SAP Basis experts that understand how to run and manage SAP landscapes on a public cloud platform!

Now your technical planning can begin – here is a short list of other heartburn inducing topics:

Are your current SAP systems supported in the public cloud? Do you need to perform an SAP patch, upgrade or OS/DB switch?
- SAP has certified combinations of SAP applications, OS and DB versions that they’ll support in the public cloud.
- Determining if your existing systems fall into what is supported will influence the methods used for migration.
What method(s) are going to be leveraged to migrate your systems? Hint: In most case you’ll leverage multiple methods
If you have many SAP landscapes and systems, do you migrate one landscape at a time or aim to do all landscapes at once?
- If possible, keep things simple and don’t bite off more than you can chew. However, if you split the migration into chunks, make sure that your network connectivity can support bandwidth requirements between migrated systems and those remaining in the original datacenters. A “Big Bang” approach is also possible, but requires extremely detailed cutover planning.
How do you plan on handling change control in SAP?
- Ideally, you’d freeze all changes and eliminate this requirement. In the real world your development system will be migrated first and you’ll either have two development systems – one in the public cloud and one in the original datacenter or you’ll shut down your original development server and only have the new system in the public cloud. In either case you have hurdles to overcome with how changes will move through the SAP landscape while the migration is in progress.

How much downtime can the business tolerate for each application being migrated?

This will become a huge factor in influencing many other decisions that will need to be made and only your business knows this answer!

How do you plan to get your data to the public cloud once its exported or backed up?

Can you establish speed connectivity between your on-premises or hosting providers network to transfer data from server-to-server?
Can you utilize a high bandwidth Internet upload to transfer data into a Cloud Storage Bucket?
You can’t just drive a NAS device up to a public cloud datacenter and ask their “smart hands” to plug it into your environment. The physical vessel for your data into a public cloud datacenter is limited to a Public Cloud Transfer Appliance. Using this option requires additional cost consideration, understating of timings and orchestration of human datacenter resources and shipping partners.

Don’t forget about…
- Engaging global business process owners early on so they can begin planning for the scope of testing.
- To test printing or migrate print servers.
- To consider interfaces such as tax, fax, email, document storage/archival, encryption services, etc. You may need to re-install these interfaces and plan a migration of each of them in addition to your core SAP server migrations.
- Review your external access requirements. Your existing environment may allow connections in from the Internet by way of a public DNS records, firewall rules (NAT) and reverse proxies such as SAP Web Dispatcher. These will need to be replicated in the new public cloud environment.
- Hostname changes and IP address changes. DNS records will need to be created or updated and configuration between SAP applications may need to be updated to reflect hostname and IP address changes. This will also require updates to SAP GUI connections on each user workstation and bookmarks in browsers.

Key Considerations for Your SAP Migration to the Public Cloud

Up to this point, we’ve just covered the usual pain points and topics involved with your average run-of-the-mill SAP landscape migration. Most of this isn’t unique to an SAP migration, so what are some key considerations specific to a public cloud migration? Here is a taste of common challenges:

Network Connectivity between the public cloud and customer sites such as datacenters, corporate offices, branch offices, field locations, warehouses, etc. If your existing on-prem systems or systems at your hosting provider have access to a location this means that your systems in the public cloud will also need to have access to these same locations. If you have low tolerance for downtime during your cloud migration then your best bet is to ensure that you have either a fast connection to the public cloud from your existing datacenter or you have a fast Internet upload speed from your existing datacenter. If you are currently in a hosting provider’s datacenter, you’ll also need to make sure that the network connectivity between your on-premises networks are ready for the new public cloud connectivity. For this, you should consider implementing a Cloud Interconnect and VPN connections (for redundancy). Try to get network decisions made with plenty of lead time because telco providers are slow, and they don’t speed up for anyone or anything. Expect delays and build “fudge” time into your project plans.
Network Security is a blank slate when you initially create a VPC in the new public cloud platform. To ensure the that are protecting your systems, you must take precautions to ensure that your firewall ingress/egress rules are maintained in the most stringent way possible. Your certified public cloud partner can help ensure that you are securing your systems through your public cloud firewall rules.
Security (Identity and Access Management) in the public cloud can be complex. No this is not SAP level application server, that doesn’t change from what you’re used to. Most public clouds, provides a menu of services and products that are used together to accomplish your wildest IT dreams. As you can imagine there is great power involved in being able to modify networks, provision compute, maintain firewall rules, control backups… you get the picture. Understanding IAM allows you to ensure that these functions are assigned to the appropriate people. Your certified public cloud partner can evaluate your IAM access controls and recommend the best security model.
Cloud Quotas are allotted to each public cloud project and region. As you’re building systems, pay attention to the specific public cloud quotas to make sure that you aren’t about to hit your standard limits. Quotas can be extended quickly and easily if they are reasonable requests such as extending persistent disk SSD by 1 Tb. Just don’t expect to extend SSD storage by 1 Petabyte without doing some capacity planning with the public cloud vendor or your certified cloud partner. Quotas are important to stay on top of, if you don’t you might not be able to build those 10 systems you need to have done by tomorrow morning!
Get to know the Machine Types. SAP doesn’t support or recommend all of the available public cloud machine types, so you’ll have to choose the closest fit based on your SAP Quick Sizer or SAP HANA sizing output. You can also customize machine types so long as CPU to memory stays within the SAP recommended ratio. There is a benefit to knowing what machine types you plan to use for each of your server builds because it allows you to starting thinking about Committed Use Discounts, which I’ll cover later.
Capacity Planning and Compute Reservations are two different things, but are closely related. You might ask, why you’d need to think about capacity planning? I’m going to a public cloud platform so I can stop thinking about capacity planning, right? Well it is still beneficial to consider this as you are entering a large migration project. Ideally your certified public cloud partner would be working closely with the cloud vendor to let them know that they’re about to see 200 servers created on their infrastructure over the next three months. Even public cloud datacenters have a finite set of compute resources available. Letting them know how many servers you’ll be creating in a specific zone, with the machine types of those servers for the CPU, RAM and disk requirements will ensure that the public cloud has the compute available to support you as you provision your servers during each phase of the migration. Compute Reservations are similar to capacity planning in a way because they allow you “pin” public cloud resources to your project without them be used by other public cloud customers. One day you could run into a situation where your SAP Basis team needs to restart your SAP Production HANA server. If the particular region your server resides in is tight on resources, you could be forced to use a different instance type after the reboot. This could result in reduced performance. If you had reserved compute prior to the restart of your SAP HANA server, your stake on “ultramem” that specific instance type compute would have been protected it from other customers. Please note that you will start paying for compute that you reserve as soon as the reservation is created.
Database Backups aren’t rocket science in the public cloud. Typically, your database backup will either integrate with SAP BACKINT and will write the backup directly into a Cloud Storage Bucket or will be backed up to a local filesystem and then copied to a Cloud Storage Bucket. Either way, your backups will be stored in a Cloud Storage Bucket and the settings maintained for the Bucket will determine when data is copied to cold storage and how long it is ultimately retained in order to control storage costs. Because the Cloud Storage Buckets can be multi-regional, you’ll have the ability to restore your database backups to any public cloud VM around the world!
Disk snapshots are used to ensure that your VM’s disks can be restored. Think of disk snapshots as you existing OS backup or “foundation” to restoring a server. Before you can recover a database you first need your VM to be operational from a desired point in time. Disk snapshots give you the ability to restore one or more disks and the filesystems (Linux) or drives (Windows) that they back. Snapshots schedules can be created, and disks can be added to snapshot schedules as required. Plan snapshot schedules carefully because, like many other public cloud functions, they can’t be changed once created unless you delete them and start over.
You’ll find that the public cloud platform supports your traditional HA/DR needs. You can provision an HA Linux cluster to support your HANA environment or setup SAP HANA system replication to provide a DR option for a production server. Again, this is pretty basic stuff, but to achieve the best HA/DR configuration you need to provision servers appropriately and span them across multiple regions for the best outcome. Your certified public cloud partner is the best resource for configuring your environment in the best way possible.
Your Monitoring Solution should be as cutting edge as your new public cloud platform. Choose a certified public cloud partner that knows SAP Basis and implements automated monitoring tools. Learn more about how Managecore uses Watchdog to automate SAP application, database, server and cloud monitoring here.
You have a shiny new toy and it comes at pretty penny unless you take advantage of cost saving options that the public cloud provides. Commits or Committed Use Discounts (CUD) provide an option to commit to using a specific amount of CPU, RAM instance types to achieve significant savings. As mentioned earlier, if you plan this out well enough, you can have the bulk of the public cloud landscape use machine types of one or two commitment types so that you can simplify your CUD purchases. It’s a little difficult to explain, but CUDs are both simple and tricky at the same time. If you over commit, you are locked into a 1 or 3-year agreement with the public cloud vendor to pay for the CUD compute you purchased and may not need. If you under commit the compute resources of VMs that you’ve provisioned won’t be subject to discounted rates. It’s best to err on the side of under committing because you can always purchase an additional CUD, just note that the 1 or 3 year commitment starts at the time of that new CUD’s purchase. CUDs and Sustained Usage Discounts are different. You need purchase CUDs whereas Sustained Usage Discounts are automatically applied if your VMs are running for the required amounts of time to qualify. Note: CUD cost savings are greater than Sustained Usage Discounts, so it pays to commit!
Track your Billing. The public cloud vendor provides a billing dashboard that you should closely monitor with your certified public cloud partner until you’ve built the vast majority of all VMs required to support your entire SAP migration. Use the billing dashboard to monitor the effect of Sustained Usage Discounts and CUDs and stay on top of your monthly spend to avoid sticker shock when you get you your first month’s and subsequent months’ bills.

Bottom line: Don’t wait until the project starts to begin planning and executing some of key steps towards moving to the public cloud.

Nobody likes a surprise migration, so plan early and plan often! Don’t underestimate the complexity of your migration or the required public cloud expertise needed to be successful.

>>> Reach out to the SAP and cloud certified Managecore team to learn more about how we can help with you migrate your complete SAP landscape to the public cloud and ensure end to end project success.

About the Author:

Jake Gagas

Senior SAP Basis Consultant

As a senior basis consultant for Managecore's delivery team Jake carries out daily technical activities and end to end project support for our customers' full SAP landscape. Jake has over 14 years of professional SAP basis experience in both technical and leadership roles, where he has supported more than 50 SAP customers. With the wealth of technical knowledge he has acquired over the many years, his co-workers look to him as an SAP 'guru'. Today Jake's focus is on implementing SAP best practices for optimal basis support, SAP projects, cloud migrations and HANA upgrade projects.

It is obvious, the way of the future for most SAP customers will be a cloud hosting model. It’s proven to be a more cost-effective way to maintain a company’s growing SAP landscape long-term, and today more than ever before SAP customers are looking to the large hyperscale public cloud vendors to migrate their SAP systems to. In this blog I will examine how to optimally manage SAP systems in the public cloud and the key considerations (infrastructure, security, DR, etc.) to be taken into account before, during and after you migrate.

Public Cloud Infrastructure

At a high-level cloud infrastructure and managing a cloud-based infrastructure has the same basic concepts of an on-premise system. In general managing systems in the cloud is very similar if not identical to managing systems on-premise, in regards to configuring the servers to ensure they have enough memory (with a correct amount of disk), implementing proper backups within the network, creating a disaster recovery plan, ensuring systems are patched, implementing security and so on. While the overall concepts are all very similar in nature, the way in which they are actually implemented for an SAP environment are very different, and that is very important to understand the uniqueness that the each public cloud has when building a cloud strategy.

Step 1 – Cloud Architecture

If we start from the very beginning architecting a system in the cloud, specifically an SAP system in a public cloud environment is very different. This is mainly because each public cloud vendor has their very own specific requirements regarding what instance types of SAP can be run. SAP also dictates which of those instance types they will support. When architecting an SAP system’s infrastructure in the public cloud, there is a lot of information that must be understood by your solution architecture team to not only review the public cloud notes regarding running SAP in the new environment, but your team must also have a firm understanding of the SAP notes regarding which systems, instances and product versions are supported. One example of this is that SAP does not support MDM 7.1 in a Cloud environment. You can check OSS note 2722210 for more specific detail, but if you’re running this version of MDM you will need to consider alternatives.

Building any type of systems in a public cloud environment is very different than on-premise, the configuration utilities (although there is some support from for VMware in the public cloud) are an example of this. Most SAP migrations start out using the public cloud’s own hypervisors (a hypervisors are the mechanism by which the virtual machines are managed). For example, when you set up a virtual machine in the Google Cloud Platform, Google has its own proprietary tool. Thus there is a learning curve to be able to use Google’s toolset that your SAP cloud team must understand, to then be able to get the new SAP cloud environment setup correctly regarding provisioning of memory, tuning the instance, choosing the operating system (loading the operating system) and much more. Its important to understand and delineate that the general concepts of public cloud architecture are the same, but the mechanics in which your team executes those tasks are very different and vary from each cloud vendor.

Migrating SAP to a Public Cloud Environment

When you start to perform the actual migration of the SAP environment, there are very specific requirements from both SAP and the public cloud vendors regarding how and what can be run in their environments. This goes well beyond just the initial architecture, as your cloud implementation team must know how to configure your SAP systems to properly and optimally run in the new public cloud environment once live.

As I like to say, running SAP in the public cloud is a little bit of an ‘unique animal’ and some might even go so far as to say its more of an ‘art’ form than a ‘science’ when considering all of the integrities that are involved to migrate SAP to the public cloud. It entails everything from knowing how to properly set up the SAP system to operate at optimal performance, knowing how to configure the disk, and many more details that must be taken into careful consideration. For example, each of the public cloud vendors have different types of disk some have a higher performing disk while others have a lower performing disk, the migration team has to have an understanding of these vitals concepts and how to properly implement them in a very unique way in order for your SAP environment to be successful in the new public cloud environment.

Lastly, there are many tools that can help migration SAP workloads to the Cloud. Google’s Anthos Migrate (previously Velostrata) is one such tool that can automate the migration of systems directly to the cloud. There are many benefits to using a tool such as Anthos Migrate including the minimizing of downtime, automation for moving dozen to thousands of systems, and improved network control to maximize throughput.

The method of data transfer and migration is dependent on several factors which will need to be evaluated based on your specific technical criteria.

Performing the Cloud Migration

Traditionally when migrating SAP systems from one data center to another, you would back up your systems by using tape or maybe a USB device, you could then take that device or tape to the other data center you are migrating to,to then recover it and start your systems up again. It’s a similar process when migrating to the public cloud, with the exception of course is that you can’t just walk into Google’s data center and plug in a USB drive. Each public cloud vendor has transfer appliances in which your cloud migration team can order and use to complete the migration. There are some limitations that need to be taken into account, the timeline for using these appliances and the speed at which you can use those devices can get a little complex. These appliances are also not a great method to migrate a large database over a weekend without a lot of extra planning and configuration. Cloud storage which is meant to store backups are also needed to be properly configured.

If you have a smaller SAP environment, you can just do it over the network. Once you have your network established from your current data center into the cloud you can just transfer those files over the network, provided that it’s a smaller database.

Migrating your SAP landscape to a public cloud solution can become a little more challenging when it’s larger terabytes of data needing to be transferred. In some instances, the transfer rates of large databases at different network speeds will simply take far to long ( it could even take days to transfer over the over the network). Consulting with a skilled SAP cloud migration team will help you understand your options and the best approach to take.

Disaster Recovery in the Cloud

Another key factor that I briefly discussed earlier was disaster recovery and understanding the various components that must be considered when designing a disaster recovery environment in the public cloud. Again the basic concepts for DR are the same, but the requirements in the cloud are very different. For example, where your DR system is located is a critical decision when hosting your systems in the cloud. The public cloud gives you options of zones and regions. Understanding the pros and cons of your DR solution in a different zone versus a different region is another vital component to hosting your SAP landscape in the public cloud. Simply put, zones are defined as separate data centers in the same area while regions are physically different regions of the country or continent where the data center is located. If you’re in a different zone typically you are in a completely different data center facility but the data centers could be physically located across the street from one another, whereas if you are in a different region, then the data center could be located on the east coast of the United States and the other on the west coast. Beyond location, you must also take into consideration that ongoing support of how to manage the DR environment including what kind of replication to you use, the type of replication mechanisms that are supported in each unique public cloud, etc. as all of these vary in each public cloud.

Security, Security, Security

One really important aspect to running SAP in a public cloud environment is security, and truly understanding the security components of the public cloud as it is very different from that of a standard on-premise security model. Not only from a network perspective (firewalls, different network paths, routing, etc.) but there are also different security types and how to managed security in steady state. Security in the cloud also differs from each public cloud provider, and your skilled SAP team must understand all of the variations, because the last thing you would want is to have a hole in your security policies that would allow someone to get access to any part of your application. SAP customers must be very cautious about the security models in the pubic cloud and have a clear understanding of how security works. Above all, you still must have your SAP system security, and administration properly managed by a skilled SAP team.

Ongoing Maintenance SAP in the Public Cloud

After the migration is successfully completed the next item you must think about is the ongoing maintenance of your SAP systems that are now hosted in the public cloud environment. The long and short of it is there is a whole layer of administration that will still very much require ongoing managing. Just like any application that is migrated to the cloud especially SAP, you still will need the ongoing architecture and operating system support in place to support the long-term vitality of your SAP system.

Skilled IT Managed Services for SAP in the Public Cloud

Although many public cloud vendors offer SaaS based products or commonly referred to by many public cloud vendors as a ‘services’, for example Google provides big query as a service, where users can access the database and not have to worry about managing the infrastructure or anything additional, Google manages everything behind the scenes on your behalf through this service. Migrating SAP to the cloud is not that simple. Unfortunately, there are no services available from public cloud providers where you can load SAP to the public cloud and have it all managed on your behalf. SAP systems still require you to have someone fully managing the infrastructure, network, security, etc. As discussed throughout this blog, there will always be a need to continue to fully manage your SAP systems regardless if they are hosted in the public cloud or not. You can think of it even like an on-premise scenario, where the operating system and the infrastructure there is generally a clear point where you could delineate where one team supporting it versus another and team is providing support. This is still achievable in the public cloud but at the end of the day again someone still needs to have the skill sets to manage properly manage the infrastructure and SAP environment.

At Managecore we work directly with our clients to give them options, if their internal infrastructure team wants to learn and continue to manage the infrastructure components in the public cloud we can help them do that. They might already have experience in doing so, and the Managecore team is happy to help them continue to be able to do so. Or if our client prefers a truly turnkey cloud solution Managecore can provide that as well, where we would completely manage all of the public cloud infrastructure as well as manage the SAP environment.

It is also important to note that each of the public cloud vendors have their own SAP certifications on the cloud platforms as well certified cloud engineers as support. They do that because there is a level of complexity is unique to their own cloud. Like any certifications in the IT industry you want to make sure the team that is providing your crucial SAP system support is properly trained and certified to do so. These certifications are just added confidence that the support team you have employed has attained the proper training and now holds the proper knowledge of the public cloud platform.

The Same, But Different

In conclusion, it’s safe to say that a public cloud-based SAP hosted system may not be more complex but it will have many differences that will need to be accounted for upon building, deploying and maintaining your SAP systems.

>>> Let Managecore cloud-certified architects assess your SAP landscape and help you determine if the public cloud is right for your environment. To get started we offer a cloud simulator that helps you get answers to your questions before making the commitment to deploy or migrate your critical SAP system into the cloud. Get your cloud analysis completed today! https://info.managecore.com/en/managecore-cloud-simulator-request

>>> For immediate SAP on Public Cloud solution support, contact our team today!

About the Author:

Frank Powell

Partner/President

Frank is an experienced Information Technology executive that excels in high-level strategic and operational guidance to help manage and grow businesses. With 25 years experience in IT and over 19 of those years specifically in SAP, his thought leadership on industry trends, process improvement and best practices at SAP events, conferences and educational webinars are invaluable assets for companies. Frank provides his past experience in developing new technology initiatives with ever-evolving innovations to grow businesses and achieve high-performing solutions at a lower cost of ownership for your company.

In this thought leadership blog, I will discuss how customers are seeking to get full access to how their SAP landscape is managed. And in turn, how Managed Service providers should be equipped to accommodate their customers with full transparency. This blog post will explore ways in which MSPs should be transparent in not only their service delivery approach, but also the way in which they use technology to manage SAP environments.

Information Technology is Complex – So Make Communication The Key

Information technology in general is very complex, with multiple layers at work to make any type of IT application function properly. For an SAP environment there are various components that must work together to successfully run the application, but that also make it complex to properly manage such as networking configuration, databases, operating systems, and security In today’s world there’s no such thing as a one person IT team, but rather dozens if not hundreds (at large companies) of employees make up an IT department (each with a specialize skill set) that must cooperate together to optimally run a complex IT landscape. Inside companies with internal IT departments they all traditionally reside under “one roof” where there can be dozens of meetings held in any given week to coordinate all of these efforts. There’s also typically a hierarchy of management, and organized processes to keep all these dynamic and complex components working efficiently together.

In general, I feel that tends to work well for most large companies. While some IT employees might argue that from time to time even internal communications are not the best on any given IT project, generally all employees are kept in the know. And if there are any questions or issues they can simply walk down the hall and ask a team member for help.

Communicate, Communicate, Communicate

That all changed however, when companies began to outsource management of their IT systems, that once streamlined in-person approach to communication inherently broke down. Unlike before, you can no longer just walk down the hall and tap somebody on the shoulder to get an IT issue resolved or question answered. You are now exclusively reliant on working with an external team, who most likely is supporting a very critical portion of your IT environment. A new way to communicate must be established between internal teams and the external managed services partner. Which at times can be both scary and anxiety ridden for SAP customers that do not have a good communication channel established with their MSP. I know from talking with many frustrated prospects over the past several years, that in the worst-case scenario when there is a critical problem and there is no communication with or from their MSP – its maddening! As an SAP customer you want and deserve to know why the issue occurred, what the root cause was and most importantly who or what is being done to resolve the problem.

It’s in our human nature that in a crisis we want to know all of the information as soon as possible, especially to feel more in control of a situation that is out of our control. Having instant access to communicate directly with those that have vital information is the way to relieve the anxiety of the unknown. For example, when a family member is ill we cannot wait to talk directly to the doctor that has the critical information (good or bad) and until we get this information are fraught with anxiety.

Now in a scenario where your SAP system is experiencing an issue having a lack of communication with your MSP can compounded worry with mounting frustration. Your management team wants answers now and you do not have them, meanwhile your system is in crisis and you are left scrambling to understand why.

I remind my team of this, as they have counterparts within our customers, who have their own management team that they need to report to as well. Their manager is at their desk asking what the issue is, and how is it being resolved. So we were sure to build fluid and transparent communication within our service delivery model, as this has proven to be so vital for our customers to have the answers and feel confident in the support they are receiving.

T is for Transparency

So what do I mean by transparency as it relates to your MSP? Transparency is the ability for an MSP to openly communicate directly to their customers in a frequent and consistent manner. With effective communication methods that keeps them up to date of what’s happening and why it’s happening applying to both issues and steady state operations.

I cannot stress this enough in a crisis situation having access to information is critical. Even if it is just communicating to the customer every 30 minutes that there is no resolution yet, but it is actively being worked on. Now the customer has an answer to give their internal team and feels confident that the issue is being actively addressed.

Transparency is Two-Way

It’s important to understand that transparency goes well beyond just communicating issues in a crisis, its extends to having full transparency into your outsourcing relationship and ultimately trust. Take for example, openly sharing of documentation that an MSP has created jointly with the customer. I can tell you, there are a lot of managed service providers that consider this documentation to be their intellectual property and are not willing to share it with their customers. While I would argue that sharing of this documentation is critical to a customer’s own success, and the SAP processes documented are not a secret as they still require a knowledgeable consultant with the right experience to implement. So why not give customers full access to this information to ensure their system’s overall health? For instance, customers that are FDA compliant, are required to document any change in their infrastructure including how it was done and proof that it was completed correctly. Your MSP should be transparent and willing to sharing this documentation with you, as it’s not only very critical for a particular audit, but also a procedural requirement for your system’s well-being.

Transparency in Technology

At Managecore we incorporate the concept of transparency not only in all of our communication methods, but its purpose built within our monitoring toolset (Managecore’s Watchdog). We give our customers access to our monitoring tools and strongly believe this is very important for two main reasons.

First, we are delivering a full and complete view into our customer’s own systems. If for example, our customer is notified by their end user that the system performance is slower than usual, they have the proper access to log into Managecore’s tools and can view their system performance for themselves. They can see first-hand that the server performance is slow and can even drill in deeper to see if there’s any errors or if something else is going on causing the issue. Our customers are empowered and stay educated on their own systems in real-time with direct system access.

The second reason Managecore feels transparency is so important and why our customers have this layer of direct access to our toolset is that we have found that overall time to resolution has decreased. This is due in part to the customer knowing what is going on within their own business. Giving access to Managecore’s unique SAP monitoring toolsets allows our customers the same level of visibility that we have, but they are armed with knowledge of the daily operations. A perfect example of this is when slow performance is identified, the customer is able to instantly understand if the business is undergoing something that may negatively impact the system performance, such as a large shipment got pushed out that day or maybe finance is running special reports for a new customer order. The Managecore support team may not be aware of this, so with this added layer of transparency into their systems, our time to resolution is faster, as we are able to quickly pinpoint the root cause of the issue and come to a resolution much faster.

Transparency Builds Trust

Ultimately, I believe having this level of transparency throughout Managecore’s support model has led us to build a greater level of trust with each and every one of our customers. In turn giving our customers the reassurance and confidence in our ability to manage their mission critical SAP environment.

Now I will say that with this level of true transparency at times has made for very honest conversations, but I believe that our relationships with our customers have only grown stronger because of the mutual trust we have built by being so transparent. I feel that like in any professional relationship if you have mutual respect, trust and transparency you can get through even the toughest of issues together. We know that in the world of IT, issues are inevitable and the level of complexity of SAP environments is no stranger to unavoidable issues, however it is how they are handled that makes the difference. I strongly believe the key to unlocking that is simply through transparency.

SAP customers today should demand transparency from their MSP and rightfully so. If your MSP is not willing to build a fully transparent relationship with your team, it is time find a new team to manage your SAP landscape.

At Managecore our experience in the industry has taught us what works and what SAP customers are expecting. In turn, we embody a truly client-focused approach that you won’t find anywhere else, built on trust, transparency, communication, and collaboration.

>>> Sign up now for a LIVE demo of Managecore’s Watchdog on Thursday, October 24 at 1pmCST, to see the client monitoring automation platform firsthand and how we deliver truly transparent technical managed services support.

>>> For immediate SAP managed service support, contact our team today!

About the Author:

Frank Powell

Partner/President

Frank is an experienced Information Technology executive that excels in high-level strategic and operational guidance to help manage and grow businesses. With 25 years experience in IT and over 19 of those years specifically in SAP, his thought leadership on industry trends, process improvement and best practices at SAP events, conferences and educational webinars are invaluable assets for companies. Frank provides his past experience in developing new technology initiatives with ever-evolving innovations to grow businesses and achieve high-performing solutions at a lower cost of ownership for your company.

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