RISE With SAP : FAQ’s and Myths

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ONE Contract and ONE offer for business was introduced by SAP in the beginning of the year 2021 and marketed with the name "RISE with SAP". A bundle that consists of SAP S/4HANA Cloud Suite, SAP Business Technology Platform Consumption, SAP Business Network Starter Pack and SAP Business Process Intelligence.

RISE with SAP - many of SAP customers have already gone live on RISE with SAP contract and many of them will soon. Though SAP has documented it well, there are many open question and Myths about RISE with SAP concept around for others who is looking for Rise with SAP as their next SAP contract.

Sharing details of few FAQ's and user experience insights.

• What's there in the RISE with SAP package

Package comprises of Tools, Software, Services and Infrastructure Platform

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  • Tools like - Business Process Intelligence, Custom code analyzer , SAP readiness check etc
  
  
  • Software Like S/4 HANA, SAP BTP etc
  
  
  • Service - Years of maintenance service as per the contract
  
  
  • Platform - Infrastructure on Cloud of your Choice
  
  
  
  

This all includes in one package, one offer and one contract

• What is the benefit of getting every thing under one Umbrella as Rise With SAP

With One package you simply get one neck to hold on for anything whether it is Network and security ,Infrastructure, operating system, database or application which makes the operations easy.

With this, you also get the benefit of services with defined SLA's, helping hand for managing operations and issue management.

Off course the TCO benefits - case by case and depending upon your requirement and Project size.

• What are the different deployment models are available

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  • Public cloud - S/4 HANA  as SaaS deployment.
  
  
  • Private Cloud -  S/4 HANA as PaS deployment.
  
  
  
  

• What is typical system landscape for S/4 HANA in Rise with SAP

Depending upon the use case - SAP is offering two system landscape and three system landscape as a standard

Two System :- Development and Production

Three System :- Development, Quality and Production

However, depending upon the use case - Rise contract can be modified for 4 , 5  or 6 ... system landscape with some additional cost. You may choose to have all these systems as part of your transport(change route) or you may opt to keep them out of transport path.

Along with S/4 system, you also get below peripherals for different purpose.

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  • SAP Web Dispatcher
  
  
  • SAP Fiori embedded
  
  
  • SAP HANA runtime
  
  
  • SAP Cloud Connector (optional, on customer request)
  
  
  • Enterprise Support
  
  
  
  

You also get network support as if you need to connect some other third party service providers with your S/4 system - for example SMTP and SMS gateway provider etc..

• Who decides the cloud platform service provider

Its you as end customer have total control on choosing your favorite cloud platform provider.

So far you have an options of Google Cloud, Azure, AWS and Alibaba. IBM cloud will also be the part of Cloud Infrastructure Providers soon.

• What are the high level factor that end customer should consider before deciding between public or private cloud deployment 

Private Cloud :-

If you as end customer wish

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  • To move to cloud at your own pace by keeping prior investment including ECC customizations, configurations, and partner add-ons
  
  
  • To get Software, support , technical managed services from single point of contact with defined SLA
  
  
  • To consume S/4 HANA system with standard solution but also wants to do customization as per your business requirement
  
  
  
  

Public Cloud :-

If you as end customer wish

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  • To  have a complete, modern, native SaaS ERP solution with the full benefits of public cloud and reimagine business processes and take advantage of standardized best practices
  
  
  • To have a clean Cloud ERP solution without converting legacy ERP processes and configurations.
  
  
  • To have a comparatively lowest TCO
  
  
  
  

• How do you define technical managed services in RISE with SAP comparatively with other Any-Premises and benefits in RISE With SAP.

 

• What's there for current ECC and S/4 on-Premises customers in RISE with SAP

• What is the scope of BASIS/IaaS services?

SAP provide a RACI standard services, but there is still a lot of technical work to be required by customer/partner which includes  Sizing, BASIS, ABAP and Fiori Developers, and Security.

Services provided by Hyperscaler platform services are outside the scope of SAP Managed services scope.

BASIS Services are part of technical managed services and approx. 80% of SAP BASIS task is done by RISE with SAP team.

Remaining 20% includes below

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  • Transport import / Roles and Authorization / RFC maintenance and system connections / SMTP setup  / SICF services maintenance etc.
  
  
  
  

Major task of BASIS consultant(from partner or customer side) is to communicate and manage the technical services by raising service request to SAP.

For example :- if you are planning a client copy or add-on installation or application upgrade - BASIS consultant to raise a service request and rest of the activity will be managed by SAP.

The detailed Roles and Responsibility of different task  is available at Link

• How the Service Resiliency is ensured under RISE with SAP

Solution is designed in such a way that there are no single point of failure at any layer viz network/application and Database and the high availability of 99.7% in production system is guaranteed

All other required infrastructure viz. network/storage/hypervisor have got redundancy.

Applications are provisioned on virtual machines that provides high level of redundancy

• What is the backup policy in RISE with SAP.

• What is Disaster recovery and High availability plan for Databases

	Short Distance DR (Metro DR)	Long Distance DR (Regional DR)
Database: SAP HANA	Single Node	RTO=12hrs; RPO=30mins
	: RTO=12hrs; RPO=30mins
	Multi Node :
	RTO=12hrs;RPO=0hrs
Database: Sybase ASE	RTO=12hrs; RPO=30mins	RTO=12hrs; RPO=30mins

However, if Customer has purchased the optional Disaster Recovery services for RISE with S/4HANA Cloud, private edition, SAP ERP, private cloud edition, or S/4HANA Cloud, extended edition, the RTO is 12 hours and RPO is 30 minutes
for Long Distance DR and for Short Distance DR, the RTO is 12 hours and the RPO is 0 minutes. . If Customer has purchased the optional SAP S/4HANA Cloud, 4 hour recovery time objective, private edition or SAP ERP, 4 hour recovery time objective, private cloud edition, the RTO is 4 hours (instead of 12 hours) and the RPO remains unchanged as indicated above Regular DR Testing. SAP offers one annual DR failover-test as part of the DR Services to test the DR Services.
SAP ensure to re-perform any DR recovery tests that fail to achieve the applicable standards and report any failures to Customer.

For more details Refer to this Link

• Who owns the responsibility of  SSL certificate for URL's.

There are two options

Option 1 :- Customer Owned Domain : Provide private key, signed cert.

If you Choose Customer owned domain then you need to provision and provide SSL certificates to SAP and later renewal responsibility of it goes to customer.

Option 2 :- SAP Provided Domain :  hec.ondemand.com is the Domain

Frontend/backend certificates  will be taken care by sap. All you have to do  is Mention the Domain name. and your URL looks like below

Example:-

https://mychoicename.hec.ondemand.com

 Myths about cloud ERP and RISE with SAP

#1  ERP in cloud as product as a service or software as service makes it difficult to adapt to business need and its difficult to manage compare to on-premises

This is really just a myth as with Cloud you get multiple benefits like

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  • Stability for a public interface between platform and solutions on top, ensuring upgrades without hiccups
  
  
  • An enterprise-ready environment for Cloud development, including a new ABAP language version and the ABAP RESTful Application Programming Model (RAP)
  
  
  • Simple integration with plug-and-play type of BTP services
  
  
  • Software maintenance is a responsibility of SAP managed services (in RISE with SAP)
  
  
  • No worries about hardware maintenance, planning and scalability is on the fly in cloud with out really long waiting period
  
  
  •  In case if you business requirements are not met in standard package, you are open to make customization and get the business running as per need(possible in RISE with SAP private cloud)
  
  
  
  

#2 Its' always a choice between On-Premises or a Cloud

Well up to certain extend, yes, its a choice between On-Prem and cloud but that's just not it as considering new technologies and deployment strategies available today, you have broader set of options to choose from when deploying next generation ERP solutions. And this is all the way from leveraging Infrastructure as a Service – like hyperscalers to “get rid of on-premises very owned huge data centers” – to all as Software as a Service, which is by far the highest degree of standardization one can leverage. So its not always choice between On-Premises or a Cloud.

Have covered few FAQ's but for sure there are many unanswered question that you may have, please write it in comments and will try to update the same in next blog.

Your suggestion and inputs are most welcome, please hit the comment section if you have any!!!