SAP Cloud Identity Tenant - Request to Migrate to a Different Region

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Over the years I've had the opportunity to work on multiple SAP Cloud Platform related projects and some of them involved the setting up of the SAP Cloud Identity Authentication Service (SCIAS). I have blogged previously on setting up trust here however the topic of this blog post (while related) is about changing the region that the SCIAS tenant is created in.

When subscriptions to SAP Cloud Platform are purchased a new SCIAS tenant is automatically created and assigned but not linked to the SAP Cloud Platform sub-accounts. Additionally, when the SCIAS tenant is provisioned the region that it is created in is based on availability - not necessarily based on the region of the SAP Cloud Platform subscription. I have provided feedback in the past that most customers like both to be set up in the same region and some customers have legal requirements where this must be the case however I have seen a number of instances where this does not take place.

The good news is - the region of the SCIAS tenant can be changed with a simple request to the SAP support team. I know this because I have had several instances where the SAP Cloud Platform resides in Asia Pacific (Sydney data centre) yet the SCIAS tenant that was provisioned ends up in Europe.



Figure:1 SCIAS tenant residing in Europe - prior to migration

In each of these cases I have raised an incident using the SAP Support Help portal and requested the tenant to be migrated across to the Asia Pacific region - specifically Sydney.

Request To Migrate

The key to raising the incident to quicken the response is to include some key information - and of course to make sure the incident is raised in the correct Component.

Set the following to get a rapid response:

Component = BC-IAM-IDS (Identity Authentication Service)



From Region = Europe

To Region = Asia Pacific - Sydney (detail the data centre specifically!)

Tenant Name = tenantname.accounts.ondemand.com

 

The overall incident request should read something like this:

I would like to request a change of region for our IAS tenant. At the moment our IAS tenant is in Europe however we are in the Asia Pacific region.

 

I am requesting this to be changed to Asia Pacific - to the Sydney Data centre location.

 

The tenant is as follows: tenantname.accounts.ondemand.com

 

If this can be changed that would be appreciated.

Response

The usual response is quite quick and the migration usually scheduled within a week or two of the request being made. Confirmation of a mutual time is usually requested to limit impact on existing activities being performed should the tenant be operating with live applications. The impact during the migration is low however do take note of this which I have been instructed on previously.

The migration of the tenant will take around 2 hours and during this period the tenant cannot be used (it is possible to perform login and logout, but you cannot register new users during this period).

The actual migration activity involves copying the existing tenant across to a new tenant in the new region - in my case a new tenant is created (via the copy) in the Asia Pacific - Sydney region. Once confirmation that everything is ok is provided the previous tenant is removed. When SAP confirm the migration has taken place you will notice that the SCIAS tenant is now in Asia Pacific.



Figure:2 SCIAS tenant residing in Asia-Pacific - after migration

That's it! I thought I would share this just to inform those out there in this same predicament that it is possible to change the tenant location. While I did not really find the tenant performance impacted by the different region I have found that any availability issues in other regions (e.g. Europe) have impacted on our ability to service our customers even though our SAP Cloud Platform tenants are in the Asia Pacific so for this reason and others it is best I believe to have them both in the same region.

Hope this helps others and thanks for reading!