The end game for any company is to become a frictionless enterprise – agile and adaptable, equipped to quickly shift to accommodate business and customer needs. To become that malleable an organization, you must look to the cloud to create a digitally connected and resilient business with a single source of truth.

Seventy-seven percent of the world’s transactions touch an SAP system. For Fortune 5000 companies relying on SAP to run every aspect of the business, making a major shift to a fully modernized cloud platform is risky, with multiple factors to be considered including integrated third- party applications.

The basis of running mission-critical enterprise software on cloud is ensuring that it is highly scalable and performant. Yet even as SAP themselves have embraced the cloud, with new cloud products and the introduction of S4/HANA, many SAP customers are still reluctant to move from on-premises to cloud. More so, if they not only want to migrate but also require an upgrade to HANA or are considering a new S/4HANA implementation on the cloud while re-platforming and re-architecting their existing application and infrastructure landscape.

Perceived Risks of Moving SAP to the Cloud

Migrating existing mission-critical workloads can be downright scary. There are variables to consider and hurdles to overcome, including:

• the inherent complexity of migrating business-critical SAP and bolt-on systems
• costly and inconvenient downtime if the migration is not performed right or architecture is ill-planned
•  loss of performance, reliability, and business due to service degradation and performance constraints

These risks exist even for a greenfield implementation of S/4 HANA workloads on the cloud. Perhaps the greatest hurdle faced by SAP customers is the perception that cloud computing can not yet reliably support critical business functions requiring large volumes of complex high-speed transactions.

But the Rewards of Migrating SAP to the Cloud are Worth It

While these risks are all valid, they shouldn’t stop you. With a thorough plan, well-designed architecture, and a solid cloud foundation, the rewards far outweigh the risks. But enterprises making this transition do need a solid methodology and strategy. With expert partners the risks are minimized and the rewards amplified.

When you move SAP to the cloud you:

• create a consistent user experience
• scale up or down as needed
• scale out or in as needed
• integrate to create a single source of truth
• increase business resiliency
• access more tools and capabilities
• rapidly deploy applications and services
• benefit from greater flexibility of operations
• prepare for an unpredictable future

Intelligent business models and processes that blend the “skills and strengths of people and machines” are the driving force behind successful, innovative companies. “The goal should be for man and machine to complement each other in the workplace, with machines supporting human work,” says Luka Mucic, Chief Financial Officer of SAP.

Modernizing SAP to the Cloud

The trends toward increased organizational globalization and increased need for data accessibility are forcing organizations to undergo business transformation and accelerating the adoption of cloud. According to Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, the question to ask in business transformation is “What do you need to get right in order to get a lot of other things right?”

We’d argue you need to get two primary things right – the technology and your strategy.

As both a Microsoft Gold Partner and SAP Silver Partner with a rich history of successful deployments of SAP on Azure, we understand the potential risk factors and how to minimize them while maximizing the rewards. And we have the use cases, reference architectures, and methodologies to prove it.

There’s a key technological ingredient to our successful migration and integration strategy. We share that ingredient, as well as explore benefits, use cases, and migration strategies, in our eBook, “A Handbook to SAP HANA Modernization on Azure.” If you are considering, or have been tasked with, moving your SAP workloads to the cloud then this eBook is must-read material.

Forrester: “Now Tech: SAP Implementation Services Providers, Q1 2020.” Forrester.com Report

LinkedIn: “Unpacking the challenges for SAP and the broader enterprise market.” LinkedIn Article

Click Here to Download the Ebook

Azure NetApp Files is Made for SAP Workloads in the Cloud

SAP customers have been hesitant to move their mission-critical workloads to the cloud. But that early hesitation is diminishing as more companies realize the benefits that running their SAP landscape on Cloud provides. Enterprise cloud migrations are complex, especially when you factor in all the customized, bolt-on applications that integrates with the SAP platform.

If you are a company that relies on SAP and are considering cloud computing, the idea of migrating your enterprise application and infrastructure portfolio to a cloud platform can be quite intimidating. This is especially true if your company has a large and complex technology landscape with many mission-critical legacy systems as well.

Those deciding to modernize are sometimes surprised by the challenges that pop up. The top three challenges to cloud newcomers are unplanned downtime, data migration, and a lack of detailed cloud strategy. These hurdles can be overcome with the right resources and the right strategy.

Minimize Risk with the Right Cloud Strategy

Forrester recommends that SAP customers look for partners that can chart the course to cloud and take the journey along with them. They identified three things that the ideal SAP implementation partner should bring:

• experience with using the latest SAP and cloud technologies needed for an agile business
• transformation methodologies and know-how to bring new business models to bear, including change management as well as people and processes ready to navigate regulatory and industry-specific trends
• modern delivery techniques including reference architectures and accelerators to reduce project risks and costs, speed time to value, fill in gaps, and drive customer innovation

Khoj Information Technology has a proven history of delivering risk-free Microsoft Azure Cloud migrations to SAP customers. Our 27 point CloudScape4SAP methodology guarantees to make the migration (and the downtime) as painless as possible.

Azure NetApp Files Helps Make Cloud Migrations Painless

For customers implementing SAP on Azure, two very important architectural considerations are centered around storage strategy and storage solution for their SAP HANA landscape Traditional deployments were limited to shared storage NFS clusters on Linux providing for both SAP Applications and SAP HANA or vendor provided NAS storage. The introduction of Azure NetApp Files was a game changer, which provided several shared storage options optimized for SAP applications and SAP HANA.

What is more is that Azure NetApp Files (ANF) is a Microsoft Azure native storage solution certified by SAP for SAP workloads.

NetApp and Microsoft co-engineered Azure NetApp Files based on NetApp’s ONTAP operating system. It gives Azure customers a high-performance, low-latency file service. It brings on-premises performance to the cloud so that core business applications such as SAP can reap the benefits of modernization without the lag. Certified to work with SAP HANA, Azure NetApp Files offers the following benefits:

• Cost optimization
• On-premises or better performance
• Agility
• High availability (99.99% uptime guaranteed)
• Scalability

At Khoj, we use Azure NetApp Files centric architecture to support highly available SAP HANA environments in scale out configurations.

For customers assessing NFS solutions using both the homogenous SAP-workload approach and the holistic enterprise-workload approach, Azure NetApp Files is the clear leader in the market. There are other competing IaaS and PaaS solutions for SAP workloads, but many of these are not SAP-certified or supported.

Get SAP to the Cloud with Azure NetApp Files

Azure NetApp Files provides enterprise-grade data management and storage to the Azure Cloud to solve performance and availability challenges. Customers can now deploy HANA standby nodes in cloud. This was not possible with earlier solutions.

For newer versions of HANA, SAP has introduced HANA snapshot methodology for backups requiring storage-level snapshots. Azure NetApp Files supports these capabilities, leading to faster backups, lower RPO’s and RTO’s, and quicker QA refreshes, which makes it a critical component of business resiliency and disaster recovery strategy. Azure NetApp Files is not only integral to accelerated migration and deployment, it’s also a critical part of your future-ready cloud infrastructure.

At Khoj our several reference architectures centered around ANF help customers realize great ROI using SAP on Azure along with Azure NetApp Files-based storage.

To learn more about Khoj’s CloudScape4SAP cloud migration methodology and how Azure NetApp Files can help your company get SAP to the cloud painlessly, check out, “A Handbook to SAP HANA Modernization on Azure.” It’s an eBook exploring benefits, use cases, migration methodologies, and reference architectures for SAP customers moving to Microsoft Azure.

Tech Republic, “SAP Users Face Key Challenges and Benefits as They Move to the Cloud.” Techrepublic.com Article

Forrester, “Now Tech: SAP Implementation Services Providers, Q1 2020.” Forrester.com Report

Click Here to Download the Ebook

The Campbell Soup Company is an iconic food company that produces meals, beverages, and snacks and generates more than USD8 billion in annual revenue. To improve reliability and availability and build greater flexibility and scalability into its core SAP environments, especially after its large acquisition of Snyder’s-Lance—Campbell migrated to SAP HANA on Microsoft Azure with the help of Khoj Information Technology.

Click Here to Read More

Food maker Chobani grew quickly and needed an IT environment that could keep up with future growth and changes. The company chose to implement SAP S/4HANA and other SAP applications on Microsoft Azure. With assistance from its current support partner Khoj Information Technology, Chobani continues to enhance a high-availability environment using the latest technologies like SUSE Pacemaker Clusters and Azure Site Recovery. The company now has a unified environment, better uptime, and instant scaling—all which will help the company operate more smoothly and analyze data to make fast, innovative business decisions.

Click Here to Read More

SAP on Azure migration Campbell – Click to read whitepaper

Learn from Campbell’s successful migration of 15TB ECC, SCM and Live Cache systems to Azure cloud.
Challenges overcome around combined unicode conversion. Innovative use of parallel export/import using FTP for data transfer of flat files to reduce the migration window to under 24hrs.

Khoj helped Dairy Farmers of America migrate their SAP landscape to Azure. The migration was presented at SAP SAPPHIRE NOW at Orlando.

Landscape as a Service for Fortune 500 clients (Media and CPG industry segments) The Khoj team effectively leverages AWS and Azure public cloud to architect and run cost effective, secure, instantly provisioned, and agile HANA landscapes on SUSE and RHEL platforms.  Khoj has implemented this solution for multiple use cases like, Proof of Concept (PoC) Systems, Sandbox Systems, Training & Demonstration Systems and N+1 Landscapes.