According to McKinsey, the COVID-19 caused large organizations to speed up their digital transformation projects by three to four years and migrating applications to the cloud is the key enabler. This survey confirmed that cloud migration was one of the top two measures to make companies more cost effective compared to pre-pandemic norms and practices
For most large enterprises, few applications are more fundamental than their ERP, and SAP and AWS are making it easier and faster to migrate SAP workloads to the cloud. The benefits of doing so are clear. Compared to on-premises deployments, customers have gained the following benefits from migrating to the AWS cloud:
● 31% average infrastructure cost savings
● 43 % fewer security incidents per year
● 62% IT staff productivity boost
● Three times more features delivered per year
IT also doesn’t need to conduct the migration all alone.
The AWS Application Migration Service leverages deep experience, a robust partner ecosystem, and a suite of professional services to streamline cloud migration and modernization.
That expertise covers the technical aspects too. For example, Amazon’s EC2 R6i instances, powered by Intel® Xeon® processors, are SAP certified, with an 8-to-1 ratio of memory to vCPU that supports 128 vCPUs per instance — that’s one-third more than are supported by R5 instances with 15% better price performance. So, for memory-intensive workloads such as the in-memory databases of SAP HANA, an EC2 R6i instance is more than up to the task.
Plus, there’s more than 130 SAP-certified instances of different types, sizes, and prices to match any enterprise’s costs and workload needs. And if an enterprise’s needs change, instances are simple to scale.
For example, the East Asian online retailer Zalora had no trouble expanding its SAP HANA database from 244GB EC2 instances to 2TB EC2 X1 instances. The Japanese retailer, FAST Retailing, uses even larger 6TB EC2 High Memory instances. There’s plenty of power and capacity in AWS, and IT can expand on the fly with just a few keystrokes and almost no downtime.
RISE with SAP
Deploying SAP “natively”, where the customer has full control over the SAP landscape (with all the pros and cons), is not the only option. There’s also RISE with SAP with AWS. Instead of a perpetual license, SAP RISE is a subscription-based SaaS offering that provides a guided path to the cloud at any pace on the customers’ terms, not an artificial timetable.
So, with Rise with SAP on AWS, customers don’t need to worry about whether their underlying infrastructure will provide the reliability, scalability, performance and future-proofing required to meet their ERP needs. They can focus on their business, not the underlying technology supporting SAP Rise.
Additionally, the vast majority of SAP on AWS customers find that they ultimately save money. More than 5,000 customers currently operate SAP on AWS, and an IDC survey found that 85% of respondents reported moderate or significant cost savings.
And then there’s the ability to easily integrate SAP with AWS services like image recognition, artificial intelligence, advanced analytics and machine learning to gain even more value from their ERP data. This can be achieved with AWS native services or with SAP’s Business Technology Platform running on AWS. AWS offers the highest coverage of Business Technology Platform services compared to other cloud providers. Working backwards from the customer, AWS can Identify the best match for every customer requirement. With these AWS services, enterprises can identify ways to improve their customers’ experiences, optimize their supply chains and much more. SAP is better on AWS. And it’s never been easier to migrate there.