Elevate Your Business with SAP on Microsoft Azure

Overview

Hosting SAP products on Microsoft Azure is a strategic choice many businesses make to leverage the benefits of cloud computing for their SAP applications. This combination enhances scalability, reliability, and performance while reducing infrastructure management overhead. Let us explore the advantages of hosting SAP products on Microsoft Azure.

Introduction

A well-known supplier of enterprise software for numerous company activities like ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), CRM (Customer Relationship Management), and more is SAP (Systems, Applications, and Products).

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS) are just a few of the many services that Microsoft Azure offers.

Benefits of Hosting SAP on Azure

• Scalability: Azure provides dynamic scaling of resources based on the specific needs of SAP applications, ensuring optimal performance during peak usage.
• Reliability: Azure boasts a robust global network of data centers with high availability and redundancy features, reducing the risk of downtime for critical SAP systems.
• Security: Azure offers comprehensive security features and compliance certifications to protect SAP data and applications.
• Cost Efficiency: With Azure’s pay-as-you-go pricing model, businesses can optimize costs by only paying for the resources they consume.

Key Considerations for Hosting SAP on Azure

• SAP Certified Offerings: Microsoft Azure provides SAP-certified virtual machines and services optimized for SAP workloads, ensuring compatibility and support.
• High Availability: Implementing SAP in a highly available architecture on Azure, such as Azure Availability Zones, helps maintain uptime.
• Data Backup and Recovery: Azure offers backup and disaster recovery solutions to protect SAP data.
• Networking: Azure Virtual Network allows businesses to establish secure and efficient connections between on-premises infrastructure and SAP systems on Azure.
• Licensing: Consider SAP licensing agreements and licensing optimization to ensure compliance.

Common SAP Products Hosted on Azure

1. SAP HANA: SAP HANA: HANA is an in-memory, column-oriented relational database management system (RDBMS). It can be used as an application database to centralize your operations, execute real-time analytics, and gather business intelligence. A single instance utilizes HANA in Azure. Azure supports SAP HANA with:

• Virtual machines (VMs) on demand, SAP certified, with up to 12TB of memory
• Instances suited for SAP HANA with up to 20TB of storage
• Scaling enabled by TDIv4 or TDIv5 authorization up to 60 or 120TB
• 99% availability service level agreements (SLAs)

2. SAP S/4HANA: SAP S/4HANA is an integrated Enterprise resource planning (ERP) software suite developed by SAP AG. It represents a significant advancement in SAP’s ERP offerings and is designed to leverage the capabilities of the SAP HANA in-memory database platform.

• Azure offers SAP S/4HANA with operations based on RHEL Enterprise Linux or SUSE Linux Enterprise servers, an SLA for 99.99% uptime with instances in two availability Zones (AZs), high speed, short recovery time backups, and remote access for Fiori-based applications.

3. SAP Business Warehouse (BW): SAP Business Warehouse (BW) is an enterprise data warehousing solution developed by SAP AG. It is part of the larger SAP ecosystem and is designed to support managing and analyzing business data from various sources within an organization. SAP BW is used by organizations to support business functions like financial reporting, supply chain management, human resources, and more. It is crucial in enabling data-driven decision-making within an organization and is a key component of SAP’s business intelligence and analytics offerings.

• Azure supports SAP BW/4HANA with optimized operations for SAP BW and analytics, certified instance types for BW/4 HANA, and the ability to scale operations with storage dynamically.

Migration Tools for SAP on Azure

Export/Import

The Export/Import migration tool in Microsoft Azure is a set of tools and services that allow you to move data in and out of Azure storage services efficiently. It is particularly useful for transferring large amounts of data to or from Azure’s storage services.

Database Backup/restore

Microsoft Azure provides several tools and services for database backup and restore, making migrating and managing databases in the cloud easier. These tools are designed to help you protect your data, perform backups, and restore databases efficiently. Here are some key database backups and restore migration tools and services in Azure:

• Azure Backup
• Azure Database Migration Service

When selecting a database backup and restore migration tool or service in Microsoft Azure, consider factors such as your specific database system, the size of your database, your recovery point objectives (RPOs) and recovery time objectives (RTOs), and your overall data migration strategy. Azure provides a range of options to suit various scenarios, from small databases to large-scale enterprise solutions, helping you ensure data protection and availability in the cloud.

Conclusion

Selling SAP on Microsoft Azure represents a compelling proposition for businesses seeking to leverage the power of SAP’s enterprise software in a cloud environment. This strategic alliance offers numerous benefits, including scalability, reliability, security, and cost-efficiency.

Businesses can work with CloudThat to ensure that their SAP systems have high availability and scalability while being less expensive. Please contact us if you have questions about hosting your SAP workloads on Microsoft Azure.

Drop a query if you have any questions regarding SAP on Microsoft Azure and we will get back to you quickly.

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