5 Rules before migrating your SAP system to Cloud platform

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With almost at the half mark of 2017 we are looking a sharp increase in the number of customers moving on ‘SAP running on Cloud platform’.

It turns out that whilst there is some transferability of skills required to migrate existing SAP application whether its ERP or BW or any SAP products.

With that in mind, here’s is my 5 rules established while migrating and updating (on same time) to SAP systems to any cloud - AWS/Azure/Google/Vistrusteam/SAP Cloud platform/rackspace/

Rule#1 – Sensibly Plan for the migration and budget: SAP migrations are strategic decisions that require assessing the entire SAP landscape and deciding what to migrate to cloud, including a move onto the HANA or a transformation to SAP S/4HANA or BW/4HANA or BW4HANA

Rule#2 –Launch and touchdown testing - Many SAP solutions are running on legacy operating system and database combinations that are unavailable on public cloud. In other words, there’s no opportunity to “lift and shift.” Instead, enterprises must change the operating system and/or database of the SAP solution, which impacts how it runs and requires additional testing. This can contribute significantly to the migration timeline and costs of the overall effort.

Rule#3 – With Migration process Comes Great Responsibility: It’s important to establish production-like reference systems, making full copies of the SAP production environment(s) using production-sized legacy systems plus production-sized cloud systems. Completing a mock migration run using production-like source systems will make it possible to accurately predict the necessary outage window for the business and target actions to condense it with appropriate lesson learned while switching to cloud platform. Migrating environments will invariably require greater processing power and throughput than running those same environments later in production. This makes environment sizing an important consideration and can mandate using the largest available virtual machines for migration. Afterwards, these machines can be downsized.

Rule#4 –  Even man of steel can fail: With strong skills in infrastructure and SAP, many enterprise IT departments will still need guidance or outside expertise to execute the SAP migration to the public cloud. Navigating and troubleshooting the requisite database migrations across multi-layered, parallel work streams is inherently difficult, so do not undervalue the experience of having ‘been there and solved for that.’ The ideal migration team will combine IT specialists with deep experience in SAP operating system/database upgrades, and cloud infrastructure specialists who can design the cloud landscape and build-up virtual machines to run SAP optimally in the cloud. Given the high-paced learning curve, consider doing things differently and augmenting your core IT team with experienced resources for the migration.

Rule#5 – Important to wash and Rinse your system before migration : Many enterprises have accrued massive amounts of SAP data, some of which they seldom use. Inconsistent source data, corrupted or missing data, and unreadable data formats can bog down the SAP migration to the public cloud. A better answer is to proactively cleanse, archive and purge to reduce data anomalies—and, more importantly, minimize the time and labor costs to move, maintain and support data that does not add value.

Conclusion cloud platform brings scalability, elasticity, agility and reliability to the enterprise. To take advantage of the benefits of the cloud, enterprises should adopt a phase-driven migration strategy and try to take advantage of the cloud as early as possible.

 

Any feedback and tips – what have I missed here?

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Best,

Amit Lal