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Get Your Organization Ready to Run SAP Commerce Cloud
SAP Commerce Cloud is a platform-as-a-service cloud offering. It's of utmost importance to leverage SAP's recommended practices whenever possible. A migration to the cloud may require changes to your development processes, support procedures, and operations. We recommend reviewing and understanding our product capabilities, service level agreements, and service descriptions before initiating a cloud migration project
The most relevant documents to consider in scoping a migration project are the service description at SAP Help and general agreements at SAP Trust Center:
- SAP Commerce Cloud Services Details
- General Terms and Conditions for Cloud Services incl. the latest SAP Commerce Cloud, composable edition and SAP Commerce Cloud, premier edition Supplement
- Service Level Agreement for SAP Cloud Services
- Support Policy for SAP Cloud Services
If you are new to cloud transitions or possibly undertaking this for the first time, devising a cloud strategy will be crucial to your success. Furthermore, it would help if you partitioned the activities into phases to enhance flexibility and allow time for your business to assimilate changes.
Change can be challenging to manage well. Different departments may have distinct requirements and familiarity with their current processes and hardware might impede change. It's natural for teams to be cautious.
However, the cloud encourages change and fosters opportunities - I encourage you to embrace it!
Fundamentals
Business requirements
As part of the business planning process, you should:
- Define the short and long-term goals.
- Plan your optimal user journeys (must-haves, should-haves, like-to-haves).
- Focus on priorities, dependencies, training requirements, workflows, and current requirements in relation to existing challenges.
- Define the end-state regarding an all-cloud solution vs. a hybrid architecture: detail where the workload sits and which infrastructure takes the load—new lines of business, processes, developments, and functionality.
What exists today
You must create a comprehensive picture of your current state: conduct an extensive assessment of infrastructure, architecture, policies, performance, hosted applications and their compatibility, application functionality, integrations, business processes, security requirements, and disaster recovery strategies. Identify and evaluate specific application standards, legal requirements, risks, and dependencies. Document the significant costs of maintaining your on-premise infrastructure, including hardware, data centers, and support teams.
Outline the potential risks, challenges, and mitigation strategies to facilitate comparison. For more detailed information, please refer to Assessments, vital to a successful Migration to SAP Commerce Cloud.
Location and availability
As part of your move to the cloud, you could aim to reduce latency and enable quicker response times for your customers. Assess your environments, hosting, and latency considerations in light of your roadmap for potential expansion to new locations and the inclusion of additional environments.
View the data center locations where the selected SAP cloud services are currently operated.
Executing the right strategy
Every business is different and has its own Cloud strategy. The approaches below have their own merits and risks and benefit different scenarios: SAP has dedicated Migration experts to support you at every stage of your move.
Transformation Project
Investigate the necessity of retaining existing features while refactoring others to leverage dedicated cloud functionality and optimize workloads. Decide what to alter - this might involve eliminating or refactoring existing functionality, adopting out-of-the-box cloud functionality to reduce costs, or retaining existing features.
Refactoring also presents an opportunity to introduce new features and best-of-breed services. Migration is an opportune moment to evaluate which of your existing applications can be segmented into microservices to harness SAP Commerce Cloud's elasticity, scalability, and availability.
Like-for-like MOVE
One of the swiftest methods to transition is to lift all your on-premise applications and rehost them on SAP Commerce Cloud. This approach ensures that your business processes, investments, workloads, and architecture remain the same.
Businesses with an immediate need to change hosts or reduce their Total Cost of Ownership often view it more favorably. However, your existing architecture may not fully leverage the efficiencies and optimizations the cloud offers.
Compatibility
A migration to SAP Commerce Cloud requires an upgrade for several vital reasons. Firstly, the cloud version of the software is regularly updated, ensuring access to the latest features and improvements. Maintaining an up-to-date version is crucial for compatibility with the cloud environment. Secondly, SAP's on-premise version of Commerce Cloud is scheduled to go out of mainstream maintenance, necessitating an upgrade for continued support. Additionally, upgrading to the latest version often results in performance improvements, enhanced security, and access to new functionalities that can drive business growth. The upgrade process also provides an opportunity to review and potentially streamline or modernize business processes, helping your organization fully leverage the cloud environment's benefits. The cumulative benefits of these factors make the upgrade an essential part of a successful migration to SAP Commerce Cloud.
Please check if your version is compatible. We strongly recommend going live with a version in mainstream maintenance for at least six months after going live. This will give you enough flexibility to stabilize operations and day-to-day activities while adopting monthly update cycles.
Support on SAP Commerce Cloud
SAP offers a full range of services to benefit your migration project, giving you the best chance of success.
SAP Store
You can see the latest available services for SAP Commerce Cloud on the SAP Store and directly purchase them there.
Migration-specific Service Offering
SAP has been involved in hundreds of migrations and has dedicated Migration experts to help you plan, solve, and support your move to the cloud.
Assessment
Assess your existing SAP Commerce to validate your solution readiness and identify potential challenges of migrating to SAP Commerce Cloud in the Public Cloud.
For more details, check out Assessments, vital to a successful Migration to SAP Commerce Cloud.
Data and Media Migration Service
Perform a database-to-database migration from your existing SAP Commerce on-premise to your SAP Commerce Cloud on Public Infrastructure database and a direct media copy from your existing media folders to the SAP Commerce Cloud Media Blob Storage. The data transport is meant to be done using a self-service toolkit or via SAP services. For more details regarding tool support check out SAP Commerce Cloud - Data Migration in Action or review the Info sheet.
Migration Guidance Service
The service provides a custom-tailored package to support your migration project from beginning to end, including cutover support if needed.
Please get in touch with your SAP representative for more information about this service.
Conclusion
This article has provided resources to help you understand how to migrate to the new SAP Commerce Cloud. You should now be acquainted with the overall approach for migrating your commerce solution, the steps you can undertake independently (or with a partner), and those steps that necessitate SAP's involvement. While the article aims to address many customer queries, there will always be specific scenarios that may require additional clarification. If this is the case or you want to initiate a migration, please consult with your Account Executive, Customer Success Partner, or reach out to sapcx-services@sap.com.
