Azure Whitepaper

Leveraging SAP
on Azure for IT
Transformation
IT Leaders Guide

A zure

HANA
 April Leveraging SAP on Azure 2
2018 for IT Transformation

Table of 03 Introduction

contents 05 Realizing the full value of SAP applications requires a

careful review of deployment options
• Today’s environment demands greater flexibility and agility
• The pressure to move to SAP HANA and plan for SAP
S/4HANA
• Business leaders need tools for better decision making and
faster action
• Today’s deployment options for SAP landscapes
• Cloud-based options now offer production-grade SAP
environments
• Enterprises are past the tipping point of public cloud adoption
07
Moving SAP landscapes and SAP HANA applications to
the public cloud is the best option – and Azure offers the
most complete hyperscale cloud for SAP
• The risk today is around not moving to cloud
• Azure is the top enterprise-focused global hyperscale
public cloud
• The Microsoft and SAP strategic partnership is decades old
09 and multi-faceted

Why Azure offers the the most complete solution for

SAP applications in the public cloud
• Scalability
• Security and Compliance
• Business Continuity
• Global Reach
• Operational Agility
• Development Agility
• Manageability
19 • Economics

Conclusions and recommendations

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April Leveraging SAP on Azure 3
2018 for IT Transformation

01 / For years, business leaders have sought to enable revolutionary

new digital business capabilities, increase their ability to
respond to threats and opportunities, and change plans
overnight while remaining cost efficient, compliant and secure –
Introduction all while meeting day-to-day responsibilities with ease. Yet, due
to the limitations of in-place ERP deployments and other
roadblocks, few companies have transformed their IT operations
to enable these capabilities. Business leaders often lay the
blame on IT leadership, but the reality for SAP customers has
been that the ability to make those changes wasn’t possible
until recently.

The promise of SAP HANA and the cloud

IT leaders have long heard the promises of what they could do
with SAP HANA, what they could do with their ERP in the cloud,
and what they could do with all the services available in the
cloud – technologies that hold the promise of delivering the
revolutionary capabilities that business leaders envision. But
these benefits could not be achieved together because the
cloud was perceived to not be secure enough and SAP HANA
seemed to be incompatible with the cloud.
 April Leveraging SAP on Azure 4
2018 for IT Transformation

Microsoft Azure is uniquely positioned for SAP workloads

Here’s the good news: All that has changed. One public cloud, Microsoft Azure, has overcome these
barriers with the ability to support large enterprise-class SAP HANA workloads and deliver global
reach with compliant, high performance services – and some of the largest deployments in the
world have proven it. Security concerns have been overcome as built-in threat prevention systems
have proven to make the cloud more secure than on-premises security, and customers are now
convinced that with limited staff they cannot provide the same security as cloud.
All this makes Microsoft Azure uniquely positioned as the best choice for SAP customers ready to
make the move to the cloud. This white paper – written for technical decision makers – is one in a
series of papers about leveraging SAP applications on Azure to realize the full value of your
enterprise’s SAP systems and to execute upon IT and enterprise-wide business transformation.
The chains have come off and the race has begun. Within your markets, the stragglers will not
survive and the first movers will gain share. It’s about the need for speed, automation, scalability,
time-to-value, and innovation – and cloud delivers. As Frank Gens at IDC noted in 2017:
“The cloud is becoming enterprises' most critical and dependable source of sustained
technology innovations.”

Conclusion and recommendations

The status quo and traditional approaches to deploying SAP applications will limit enterprises’
success in realizing the full value of their SAP estates and hamper their digital transformation
initiatives and goals. Businesses can most effectively move beyond those limitations by leveraging
the benefits of Microsoft's global hyperscale public cloud, Azure, which provides a new generation
of SAP deployment options that offer on-demand infrastructure, specialized services, and flexibility
in the migration process.
April Leveraging SAP on Azure 5
2018 for IT Transformation

02 / SAP HANA represents a new paradigm. It offers significant

advantages to the business, but it presents challenges for IT
organizations driven by the need for new skills, hardware, and
SLAs to managing business stakeholders' changing demands for
Realizing the responsiveness, scalability and security.
full value of Today’s environment demands greater flexibility
SAP applications and agility
today requires We no longer live in a static environment. IT no longer has the
luxury of planning for some fixed end state. Until recently, IT
a careful review took a three-year view and built a solution that fit projected
of strategic needs. But that resulted in over-engineering, rigid topologies,
and over-capacity. It’s wasteful and often leads to a crisis when
deployment capacity is reached. Instead, IT leaders need to build and iterate
on a dynamic cloud migration roadmap, remaining agile and
options flexible to respond to stakeholders’ fast-changing needs while
providing accelerated time to value.

The pressure to move to SAP HANA and plan for

SAP S/4HANA
SAP will stop support for NetWeaver and other databases by
2025, and the pressure to use cloud in a meaningful way is
already present. This, combined with the need to migrate to
SAP S/4HANA and SAP BW/4HANA application suites and
modernize the surrounding applications and business
functions, has created an urgency to act. Set the end goal and
start taking steps towards it – either move any DB to the cloud,
or move NetWeaver to SAP HANA, or take the full step to SAP
S/4HANA and SAP BW/4HANA in the public cloud.

Leaders need tools for better decision making and

faster action
No matter what industry a business is in, there are new
disruptive players turning traditional incremental competition
on its ear. To start innovating in this new way requires
enterprises to unlock the value of their data; engage and
empower employees to access data; and integrate live
telemetry from operations, put it in business context, analyze
with evermore powerful tools, and take and automate actions.
 April Leveraging SAP on Azure 6
2018 for IT Transformation

Deployment options today for SAP landscapes

SAP HANA appliances: One option some enterprises are choosing today is going with SAP HANA
appliances, because they don’t have the necessary architecture and integration skills in-house. Most
enterprises taking this path are finding that they have all the problems of traditional on-premises
deployments with additional issues of inflexibility.
Managed services: Some go with managed services, usually chosen for the same reason as above –
they cannot easily or quickly hire the expertise to architect, operate and update their landscape.
Again, most are finding out that they cannot run any DB and they cannot control their update
schedules, versions, OS, or hardening. On top of this, they also lose most cloud benefits, even if the
managed service runs in a cloud. The success of the managed services option is limited to small and
medium-sized companies.
General purpose public cloud: While the public cloud has been embraced by most enterprises for
non-critical applications, many large enterprises have shied away from moving business-critical
applications like SAP into the cloud. First, everyone was concerned that cloud security posed serious
risks. Second, for business-critical applications with unique requirements – like SAP – the requisite
certifications, integration capabilities, and specialized services to support these workloads in the
public cloud weren’t available or mature.
SAP HANA by itself is not cloud-ready and adapting a general-purpose cloud to fit SAP HANA
requirements is not easy – especially for enterprise production deployments. Though the landscape
servers and all surrounding applications benefit from the cloud’s elasticity, agility and economics –
the HANA DB itself is not a born-in-the-cloud DB. The scale-up sizes and features HANA needs are
not available in general purpose clouds. Hence, large enterprises have maihnly been using the cloud
for non-production HANA deployments.
However, Azure has specialized cloud services that retain the value of the cloud while providing the
scale up, high SLA, and high business continuity features that enterprises require for mission-critical
production workloads.
Azure delivers production-grade SAP environments
The partnership of Microsoft and SAP has invested significantly into scales, topologies, operations,
and management for SAP landscapes in the Azure cloud. Azure has honed and proven a dual-
purpose strategy that uses VMs for the landscape app servers and surrounding applications and a
choice (depending on your needs) of bare metal and VMs for the DB. Only Azure has taken a no
compromises approach. It supports the largest sizes supported by SAP, providing bare metal and
VMs in close proximity to a rich set of services. Azure also provides enterprise-grade security and
compliance needed by industry and offers integrated HA, DR, backup, and a choice of monitoring,
automation and management tools.
The advantages of Azure for SAP include increased agility and speed to value, a shift from CapEx to
OpEx, support for hybrid models, shorter implementation times, stronger security, and the ability to
marry transactional data with other, often unstructured, data sources. Cloud enables the IT
organization to focus on innovation and to deliver it faster.
Enterprises are past the tipping point of public cloud adoption
April Leveraging SAP on Azure 7
2018 for IT Transformation

The number of enterprises using the public cloud will increase from 45% in 2016
to more than 90% by the end of 2019 – Morgan Stanley
Public cloud is being embraced by most enterprises today, and the majority of IT spending is now
on cloud applications and services. A cloud-first procurement strategy has become the norm, and
the tide of moving core workloads to the cloud is rising fast.
 April Leveraging SAP on Azure 8
2018 for IT Transformation

03 / The risk today is around not moving to cloud

Today, the risks around the cloud are the opportunity costs of
not leveraging its benefits, particularly for SAP and SAP HANA
Moving your application landscapes. Moving to SAP HANA without a cloud
strategy is a dead end. It will have to be redone again when
SAP landscape you decide to move the center of gravity of your IT to the
cloud, which is inevitable. So do it once, now that it is possible
and SAP HANA with Azure. The opportunity for SAP customers is realizing the
applications to value of a modernized SAP landscape combined with the right
global hyperscale cloud, which acts as a value multiplier to
the public cloud SAP benefits.
is the best option Azure is the top enterprise-focused global hyperscale
– and Azure public cloud
offers the Azure, Microsoft’s cloud platform, is an evolving collection of
integrated cloud services spanning compute, storage, data,
most complete networking, and applications. The platform offers enterprises a
smooth and seamless transition to the cloud by offering
hyperscale Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS),
cloud for SAP and a hybrid cloud model that leverages organizations’ existing
on-premises investments with cloud resources.

Two global hyperscale clouds dominate the marketplace

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure are the
two dominant players; together, they own approximately 70%
of the market. Recent statistics released by Microsoft show that
Azure recorded a 98% growth rate in the second quarter
of 2017.

SAP and Microsoft’s relationship is decades old and

multifaceted
Among leading public cloud vendors, Microsoft is the only one
that runs their mission-critical apps on SAP, making Microsoft
one of the largest SAP customers. In addition, beyond Azure,
Microsoft and SAP have been working together on deep
integration at the office and desktop level, including analytics
and SSO with Active Directory.
 April Leveraging SAP on Azure 9
2018 for IT Transformation

Microsoft completes its journey to SAP in the cloud

In February 2018, Microsoft finished moving its entire SAP landscape – an estimated 50 terabytes – to
Microsoft Azure, ending a fast-moving year long journey.
“Moving to the cloud will save us money, but this is really about becoming more agile and
innovative. This means our teams can stop worrying about keeping our infrastructure up and
running and focus on innovating without a lot of heartburn. They can run experiments, learn,
and then use those learnings to take us in new directions – and if an experiment doesn’t work,
they can easily shut it down and move on to something else.” – Mike Taylor, manager of the
Microsoft SAP program in Core Services Engineering and Operations (CSEO).
Estimates are that moving from on-premises to Azure will slash the Microsoft SAP budget by 10
percent to 20 percent or more, cost savings that come from fine-tuning usage, snoozing systems at
night and on weekends, and by leaving behind old processes that aren’t needed any more.

Microsoft and SAP are committed to

empowering digital transformation and
innovation for their customers with a 30-
year partnership that is optimized, trusted
and seamless:
• Optimized – Roadmaps and innovation
are by design, driven by co-located
developers with unique SAP and Azure
capabilities and experience.
• Trusted – Not just partners, but
customers as well. Microsoft and SAP are
both highly committed to their
partnership and joint offerings,
demonstrated by the fact that SAP is
running on Azure for their business-
critical systems, and Microsoft runs SAP,
including SAP S/4HANA.
• Seamless – Integrated enterprise-class Microsoft and SAP CEOs announcing their expanded partnership in
support is provided by co-located 2017
support staff, while co-located engineering
and aligned sales and marketing teams ensure a seamless customer experience.
In November of 2017 the two companies announced an expanded partnership offering customers
joint cloud capabilities and a trusted road map.
April Leveraging SAP on Azure 10
2018 for IT Transformation

04 / Azure uniquely solves for operational challenges for SAP

applications in the cloud
The move to SAP HANA and cloud is a challenging but critical
step, leaving IT leaders with a number of concerns. Foremost, no
Why Azure one knows what tomorrow will bring, and parameters – like size
offers the or location – that are easily satisfied today, may not be so easily
met tomorrow.
most complete Azure has had a lot of experience meeting these concerns head
solution for SAP on and doing whatever it takes to address them – even if it
means architecting new services, such as purpose-built SAP
applications in HANA bare metal solutions.
Here is a comprehensive list highlighting why Azure is the
the cloud preferred and only truly viable choice for SAP mission-critical
applications in the cloud today – and securely into the future:

Scalability
Instance size: Scale up from 0.5 to 20TB with 16
configurations to choose from. Azure offers multiple choices
of core to memory ratios in the popular range of 2-12TB,
giving Azure customers the headroom they need, along with
the right size at the right price point.
For example, Azure offers a 128 vCPU 4TB VM, a 192 thread 4TB
bare metal server, and a 384 thread, 8 socket 4TB bare metal
server. The first is perfectly fine for a dev/test/training
deployment of 4TB, the second is certified for 4TB OLTP
production workloads, and the third is certified for 4TB OLAP
production workloads.
 April Leveraging SAP on Azure 11
2018 for IT Transformation

Azure’s pioneering two-pronged strategy

Given Microsoft’s enterprise heritage, their customers demanded mission-critical SAP HANA
capable IaaS earlier than others. Microsoft was early to realize that the scale, predictability,
performance, availability, and management features required by SAP applications was
incompatible with general purpose hyperscale cloud characteristics. As a result, Azure pioneered a
two-pronged strategy and delivered purpose-built SAP HANA on Azure Large Instances.

SAP HANA on Azure Large Instances (bare metal)

Azure offers you the option to deploy SAP HANA on dedicated bare-metal servers, purpose-built for
SAP HANA with specific hardware to provide unparalleled scale and performance. SAP HANA Large
Instances offer an IaaS with 99.99% SLAs. SAP HANA on Azure large instances are in close proximity
to all Azure services and covered under the same security and compliance umbrella. Large instances
are packaged with compute, network, storage, backup, replication, WANs, and OS that are specific to
SAP HANA use. These are not individual servers but a multitenant bare metal service where replacing
the hardware – or resizing it to a larger node, or expanding storage – are supported.

Security and compliance

Cloud security concerns are a thing of the past, as security is now a cloud enabler: As we move
into 2018, concerns about the security or viability of public cloud services are mostly a thing of the
past. This is because top providers’ cloud data center security has proven to be reliable and
trustworthy for years, generally superior to most enterprises’ on-site security capabilities.
 April Leveraging SAP on Azure 12
2018 for IT Transformation

Azure security: Microsoft spends about one billion dollars per year on cybersecurity and much of
that goes to making Microsoft Azure the most trusted cloud platform. Azure represents the cutting
edge of cloud security and privacy with features ranging from strict physical datacenter security to
ensuring data privacy, encrypting data at rest and in transit, novel uses of machine learning for threat
detection, and the use of stringent operational software development lifecycle controls. With SAP
HANA on Azure Large Instances, security includes isolated networks, compute nodes, and storage
servers for each tenant as well as OS and data encryption.
Microsoft’s industry-leading security technologies and practices help ensure that Azure
infrastructure is resilient to attack, safeguards user access to the Azure environment, and helps
keep data secure. With Azure Security Center, Azure is the only public cloud to offer continuous
security-health monitoring with a unified view for your entire environment across the Azure cloud,
on-premises systems, and other public clouds. You can automatically discover and onboard new
Azure resources and apply security policies across hybrid cloud workloads and ensure compliance
with security standards. Azure security tools enable you to collect, search, and analyze security
data from a variety of sources, including firewalls and other partner solutions.

Azure compliance – more certifications than any cloud: Azure has the largest compliance
portfolio of any cloud with more than 72 international and industry-specific compliance
certifications. Additionally, Azure participates in rigorous third-party audits that verify their security
controls. Certifications include ISO 27001, ISO 27018, SOC 1 and SOC 2 Type 2, HIPAA, and
FedRAMP, as well as country-specific standards such as Australia IRAP, UK G-Cloud, and Singapore
MTCS.

Business continuity
Azure offers IaaS for SAP applications with guaranteed reliability for any database – including SAP
HANA – and application servers, delivering superior business continuity at a low cost.

Azure availability for SAP applications

 April Leveraging SAP on Azure 13
2018 for IT Transformation

• For any single instance VM using premium storage for all operating system disks and data disks,
Azure guarantees customers will have virtual machine connectivity of at least 99.9%. Single VM
SLAs make it possible to calculate stand-alone and scale-out configurations with features like self-
healing, on-demand updates, and help with availability.
• For all VMs that have two or more instances deployed in the same availability set, Azure
guarantees customers will have virtual machine connectivity to at least one instance at least
99.95% of the time. Availability sets are appropriate for application servers for N+M redundancy
and scale elasticity.
• Availability zones offer protection for entire datacenter failures with the ability to configure
99.99% HA pairs using SAP HANA System Replication or SQL Server AlwaysOn or equivalent DB
replication techniques. Availability zones are fault-isolated locations within an Azure region,
providing redundant power, cooling and networking. Availability Zones allow customers to run
mission-critical applications with higher availability and fault tolerance to datacenter failures.
• For SAP HANA on Azure VMs that have been configured in a high availability region pair, Azure
guarantees customers will have connectivity to at least one instance at least 99.99% of the time.
For databases running in a high availability mode, we recommend utilizing the database vendor’s
data replication technology such as AlwaysOn for SQLServer or Oracle DataGuard for Oracle
database.
• With Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery, customers can eliminate the hassle and cost of
secondary datacenters and tap into nearly infinite capacity that enables them to achieve low
recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) targets.
“With disaster recovery in Azure, I no longer have nightmares about what will happen if our datacenter
goes down. We can ensure that SAP, the nerve center of our business, is running at all times.” –
Abdulkareem Al Khalaiwi, Chief Information Officer, Al Muhaidib Group
 April Leveraging SAP on Azure 14
2018 for IT Transformation

SAP HANA on Azure Large Instances availability

Azure’s SAP HANA Large Instances are appropriate for very large SAP HANA database servers and
mission-critical production workloads. Built-in HA/DR features include redundant storage, network,
power, and management components.
• Single – Single nodes come with an SLA of 99.9% and use hot buffers to replace a failed bare
metal server without any changes on the customer’s part (similar to Azure VM self-healing
capabilities).

• HA pair – An HA pair configuration on Large Instances provides an availability SLA of 99.99%. SAP
HANA System Replication provides high availability and servicing without downtime. Shared block
device and shared layer 2 networks support native OS clustering and VIP-based automatic failover.

• Scale out – For scale-out configurations, unlike any other public cloud, Azure bare metal provides
N+M scale out configurations and a single node SLA of 99.9%. This allows host automatic failover
and app level SLAs nearing 99.99% at a lower cost.
 April Leveraging SAP on Azure 15
2018 for IT Transformation

• Backup, restore and DR – Azure Large Instances have in-built support for live, full, consistent
snapshots to a paired DR site in seconds, convenient for many hourly or daily snapshots to be
available at all times for low RTO point in time zero RPO recoveries. Other clouds require users to
stop operations to take a backup. Customers can recover from a disaster that takes down a
datacenter, and they can also recover from application level corruption or attack, because Azure
also has the snapshots at the DR site.

Global Reach
The Azure cloud is the leader in global coverage: The Azure cloud is supported by a growing
network of Microsoft-managed datacenters, backed by Microsoft's multi-billion dollar investment in
global datacenter infrastructure. At the start of 2018, Azure has 50 regions worldwide available in
140 countries and supports 10 languages and 24 currencies.

Global network with high-speed connectivity:

The full value of SAP HANA applications is only possible once it is connected to every office, factory,
warehouse, and branch of the enterprise – and surrounded by solutions using IoT, analytics and AI.
This requires the connectivity that Azure makes significantly easier. Azure has a global dark fiber
mesh network that may be surpassed only by the largest telcos in the world. Over 1,500 meet me
points in every metro in 140 countires connect hundreds of Azure datacenters and give enterprises
the ability to run their own Azure Stack private clouds. This gives an enterprise a global intelligent
footprint with uniform, connected, and consistent management, commercial, programmimg APIs,
and user interface.

Operational Agility
 April Leveraging SAP on Azure 16
2018 for IT Transformation

Running your SAP estate on Azure provides IT teams with significant operational agility and a wide
choice of options for key operating environment parameters. You can start with any database,
instance size, OS, and version of SAP – in any location.

Choose any DB, including Azure SQL Database, Oracle, DB2, ASE – and SAP HANA. Azure SQL
Database is an intelligent, fully-managed relational cloud database service that provides the broadest
SQL Server engine compatibility, so you can migrate your SQL Server databases without changing
your apps.

Choose any OS, including RHEL and SUSE Linux – even Oracle Linux
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) – Azure supports RHEL. In addition, Red Hat and Microsoft are
working together to provide more choice and flexibility for hybrid cloud deployments by delivering
simplified container technologies, rigorous security standards, and an integrated support experience.
In January 2018, Microsoft and Red Hat announced the upcoming availability of OpenShift Dedicated
in Azure, along with new capabilities using SQL Server, Azure Stack, and Windows Server.
SUSE Linux – This versatile Linux platform seamlessly integrates with Azure services to deliver an
easily manageable cloud with patches and support delivered directly from SUSE. Over 11,400
applications are certified and supported on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and, notably, SAP
NetWeaver is officially supported on SUSE Linux VMs on Azure.
Support for Windows Server to Oracle Linux – Because Oracle Linux and Oracle on Windows are
supported in Azure, customers who have invested in SAP NetWeaver on Oracle can migrate to
Azure.

Change your database, OS or VM size, or move to bare metal

With Azure, you get the full choice and flexibility to manage and migrate your database. You can
change your database type or OS using SAP Database Migration Option (DMO), transfer data
between locations using backup/restore, replicate data with SAP HANA System Replication (HSR) for
quick failover recovery, and resize any VM instantly or step up to a bare metal configuration.

Enjoy agile refresh cycles

Azure enables faster setup of refresh cycles:
• You can spin up dev/test QA environments on demand
• Production-consistent snapshots are also available at your DR site
• Integration with SAP Landscape Management (LaMa) gives teams the ability to clone and prep
production data for development by cloning environments and securing for dev
• Infrastructure, configuration, and SAP HANA deployment templates as code allow for the
reliable and rapid creation of environments

Operate with flexibility and automation

 April Leveraging SAP on Azure 17
2018 for IT Transformation

Azure automation and policies enable agile operations, including snoozing of unused capacity while
persisting data and configuration without the costs. Azure also supports operations like failover,
failback, DR test, DR failover, and patching – which can all be automated.

“By using Azure, we stood up an infrastructure in Japan in two to three weeks. We couldn’t
even have signed a hardware P.O. in that time if we were building our own datacenter. We
simply could not have gotten into the Japanese market without Azure.
– Tom Phillips, Vice President of Data and Infrastructure, Ambit Energy

Development Agility
Azure is the only cloud that offers fully integrated enterprise capabilities with tools that have been
built from the ground up to work together – from core infrastructure to integrations and data
intelligence – and with Office 365 as well. Azure’s agile tools and support for a broad range of open
technologies enable developers to rapidly try innovative approaches without large commitments.

“As enterprise-wide analytics and supporting new digital capabilities such as IoT from SAP
and Microsoft become essential, Azure provides the broad platform that can accelerate their
adoption.” – Accenture, SAP on Azure

The largest choice of open tools of any global hyperscale public cloud
While Azure works seamlessly with Microsoft applications and services, Azure also supports the
open source technologies millions of IT pros already rely on and trust. In fact, Microsoft is one of the
biggest contributors to open source technologies. From Node.js to Ubuntu, developers can bring
their favorite open source software tools and technologies to Azure. Notably, one in four Azure VMs
run Linux.
Manageability
IT Pros want the same level of control as on-premises deployments when it comes to managing
their SAP applications. With Azure, IT operators can maintain access to SAP tools while gaining
capabilities beyond the manageability that on-premises deployments offer. For example, greater
insights into application usage and logins, better visibility into costs – with the ability to spot and
eliminate waste – and policy-based management and controls for team access and permissions.
 April Leveraging SAP on Azure 18
2018 for IT Transformation

Azure’s
Integrated
Toolset
Azure Active Directory

Azure Security Center

Azure Backup

Azure Site Recovery

Azure Patch
Management

Azure Automation

Azure Cost
Management
(Cloudyn)

Azure Management and Security is a collection of management services that were designed in the
cloud from the start. Rather than deploying and managing on-premises resources, Azure
Management and Security components are entirely hosted in Azure. Configuration is minimal, and
you can be up and running literally in a matter of minutes. Azure Management and Security enables
Azure customers to gain visibility and control across hybrid cloud landscapes with simplified security
and operations management and immediate insights across workloads. Customers can also respond
faster to security threats and enable consistent control and compliance.
April Leveraging SAP on Azure 19
2018 for IT Transformation

Azure delivers on the long-promised value of hybrid cloud: Microsoft is in a unique position to
deliver on the promise of hybrid cloud with its combination of widely adopted on-premises
offerings along with a hyperscale public cloud platform. Microsoft's hybrid strategy lets users
integrate applications that run on local servers with counterpart applications in Azure, making
adoption of Azure compellingly attractive to Microsoft customers.
If you have on-premises applications (including SAP), they can be easily integrated with SAP in
Azure using Azure networking features like ExpressRoute and Azure Active Directory integration
with Active Directory on-premises. If these applications need computing close to the edge, they can
use Azure Stack to deploy Azure services.

“Other cloud providers told us that this kind of hybrid-cloud architecture was impossible to
construct, but with Microsoft, we not only accomplished it, but we did so in a very performant
way that wasn’t all that complicated to set up.”
– Tom Phillips, Vice President of Data and Infrastructure, Ambit Energy
 April Leveraging SAP on Azure 20
2018 for IT Transformation

Fully managed cloud in partnership with SAP – SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud with Azure: Many
SAP application developers and mid-size companies do not mind giving up control of their SAP
HANA infrastructure for the benefit of not having to hire people to architect, deploy and operate it.
For this, SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud is a perfect solution. SAP provides end-to-end managed
services for in-memory applications, database, and platform. Azure provides best-in-class
infrastructure and a wide range of services with global coverage across high-demand regions.
At the start of 2018 the solution supports up to 2.0TB SAP HANA DB with the roadmap for larger
SAP HANA configurations coming soon.

Economics – reduced CapEx, costs and TCO

SAP landscapes are made up of parts, like the application server pools that benefit from the
elasticity provided by the cloud, and the database server itself (which cannot be scaled down since it
is DB-size dependent). Azure provides the right combination that can reduce costs as much as 70%
with a one to three-year commitment. Non-production environments can have the whole landscape
spin up when needed, which is supported by Azure with large VMs. By applying these techniques
Azure customers have saved 40% of their costs while cutting down weeks-long wait times teams
used to suffer before gaining access to a new test/perf test environment.
Long-term archival of DB backups can be done using less expensive Azure Blob Storage, and peak
loads are handled by surging app servers. Additionally, with the cloud you can right-size your
landscape while having the ability to step up sizes as needed, even to bare metal servers.
Azure Cost Management, licensed by Cloudyn, a Microsoft subsidiary, allows you to track your cloud
usage and expenditures for Azure as well as other clouds. It enables IT teams to rapidly gain visibility
into cost issues and apply intelligent policies and put quotas in place to eliminate waste and reduce
costs. Additional cost drivers for a reduced TCO of SAP on Azure include: turning off resources when
not in use; elimination or reduction in servers, storage, datacenter heating and cooling costs;
reduction in IT management overhead costs; and savings on archival costs by leveraging economical
Azure cloud storage.
April Leveraging SAP on Azure 21
2018 for IT Transformation

05 / The status quo and traditional approaches to deploying SAP

applications will limit enterprises’ success in realizing the full
value of their SAP systems and hamper their business and IT
Conclusion and transformation initiatives.

recommendations Businesses can most effectively move beyond those limitations

by leveraging the benefits of a global hyperscale public cloud.
Microsoft Azure provides a new generation of SAP deployment
options that offer on-demand infrastructure, specialized
services, and flexible execution, making Azure uniquely
positioned as the best choice for SAP customers ready to make
the move to cloud. Azure enables large enterprises to realize
the full value of their SAP applications and to execute upon IT
and enterprise-wide business transformation.
In a separate installment of this white paper series for technical
leaders, Your Roadmap to SAP on Azure and a New IT
Foundation, we cover how to build a dynamic cloud migration
roadmap to guide your journey from core ERP systems to new
analytics capabilities and new technology solutions – IoT, bots,
ML and AI – all while adapting to a new cloud operating model
that relieves the burden of maintenance and frees IT to focus
on innovation.
Also see our companion whitepaper for business leaders,
Leveraging SAP on Azure for Business Transformation.
For additional information please visit the
SAP on Azure website