For many companies, the question isn’t if they should migrate to SAP S/4HANA, but when.
If you’re with one of those organizations, you probably already know there are many great reasons to migrate. After all, SAP S/4HANA can be a catalyst for your business transformation, optimization, and accelerated innovation. And you can tap into SAP S/4HANA’s advanced in-memory analytics capabilities to discover new competitive insights and business intelligence.
If you’re currently an SAP ECC customer, another important reason to begin your migration efforts is the looming 2027 deadline, when SAP is ending standard support of SAP ECC. That event is rapidly accelerating migration for many organizations from now through 2027.
Regardless of your reasons to migrate to SAP S/4HANA, the next big question you need to ask is how … What is your best strategy and path?
Important Considerations for How You Migrate
To help answer that question, here are some important considerations for choosing the right SAP infrastructure for your organization:
- Performance and Scalability – SAP S/4HANA provides many powerful features and capabilities enabled by its highly scalable, in-memory relational database management system. As a result, it is also a very memory-intensive and multi-threaded workload, thirsting for platforms with higher memory capacities and bandwidth, as well as outstanding compute performance. So it’s important that the platforms you choose can meet your performance and scalability needs.
- Resiliency – As an SAP customer, you already know how mission-critical SAP is to your everyday business operations. And that means it must remain available and accessible with minimal problems or outages.
- TCO – Enough said. With today’s constrained IT budgets, you’re always being challenged to do more with less. Carefully consider both your capital expenses and ongoing operational expenses throughout the life of your SAP infrastructure.
- Security – Another obvious no-brainer, because your SAP workloads are often reliant on your most valuable and sensitive data. It’s critical to ensure your SAP infrastructure is secure.
- Future-ready – This may not always be top of mind, but it’s important to consider that—over time—SAP will continue to add more advanced and innovative capabilities while the volume of data you’ll be generating, processing, and analyzing will likely increase. So choosing the right migration strategy today can help you minimize the time, hassle, risks, and costs tomorrow with the ever-increasing volume of data in your SAP HANA estate.
Should You Choose an On-Prem Migration Strategy?
If you’re like many companies, you’ve been running SAP on-prem for some time. That can still be an option for companies who have the IT expertise necessary to choose, configure, validate, optimize, deploy, manage, and maintain SAP in your data center to keep your business operating smoothly and continuously. Or you can also consider RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition, Tailored Option for Customer Data Center, and let SAP manage many of these functions, while still having the benefits of running in your on-premises or colocation data center. This may be particularly meaningful for companies that have data sovereignty, residency, security, or regulatory requirements that require systems to be hosted in their own data centers. Or when there is simply no hyperscaler presence in the region where the data and systems must reside.
Is Now the Time to Move to Cloud?
One way to greatly reduce the heavy upfront costs and complexities, as well as the ongoing costs and burden on your IT staff, is to migrate to SAP S/4HANA in the cloud.
The cloud’s OpEx economic model can eliminate your biggest upfront infrastructure purchase costs. Choosing the right infrastructure from the right cloud provider running on powerful Intel® Xeon® Scalable processor platforms means you can eliminate many of the early and ongoing hassles, complexities, and time-consuming challenges for your IT staff.
That’s what makes Microsoft Azure an ideal choice for your SAP cloud estate. They’ve already done the heavy lifting—offering a wide variety of proven, certified SAP instances and services.
And their Mv3 instances—powered by 4th Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, the only x86 processor certified to run SAP HANA—can address all your important needs. These instances provide high-performance and scalable capacity for analytics and transactions, with a number of flexible sizes to choose from to meet your specific performance, capacity, and cost needs. In other words, you can easily right-size your infrastructure in Azure to meet your performance, capacity, and cost objectives.
Azure also designed Mv3 instances from the ground up to maximize resiliency, which includes taking advantage of Intel’s latest Reliability, Availability, and Serviceability (RAS) features to minimize interruptions and unplanned downtime. Plus, Azure’s comprehensive security features can keep your most sensitive data safe and protected.
And finally, choosing an Azure Mv3 instance today means you’re future-ready, simplifying and streamlining your landscapes and setting a path to easily move to larger and more powerful systems when needed, as your data and analytics requirements grow.
Next Steps
Again, carefully considering all your needs and objectives upfront will help you choose the best strategy and options to move forward with your SAP migration.
If you think Microsoft Azure might be the best choice for your SAP estate, you can visit us on the web to learn more about the Intel technologies powering Azure’s SAP infrastructure. Or consult with your Intel sales team who can help guide you through the process of deploying SAP on Azure and Intel.
Notices and Disclaimers
Performance varies by use, configuration, and other factors. Learn more on the Performance Index site.
Performance results are based on testing as of dates shown in configurations and may not reflect all publicly available updates. See backup for configuration details. No product or component can be absolutely secure.
Your costs and results may vary.
Intel technologies may require enabled hardware, software, or service activation.
© Intel Corporation. Intel, the Intel logo, and other Intel marks are trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries. Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.
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