Why is SAP so important for enterprises? For over 40 years, SAP has helped companies run their businesses — managing finances, logistics, production planning, and many other critical processes. During this time, the company has become the industry leader in helping companies centrally manage and optimize resources while providing visibility to decision makers on the current performance of their organization.
 
Many enterprises are turning to the cloud, and AWS in particular, to run their SAP environment. Why? Because by leveraging the cloud, SAP customers liberate themselves from rigid architectures that previously haven’t let them innovate or scale with their business. They are gaining the agility to start new projects faster, creating higher availability and disaster-recovery solutions that would otherwise be cost prohibitive and unfeasible, and doing so at a lower price.

Here are four steps to guide you through your SAP Landscapes Journey to the cloud. 
 
First, realize that running SAP on AWS is becoming the new normal, many enterprises are doing it, and you’re not alone. Regardless of whether the cloud is already part of an organization’s IT strategy or still in the works, many customers have already implemented SAP on AWS. Take a look at some of those customers and the benefits they have gained

Second, understand the cloud isn’t difficult, it’s just different. As with any technology, there’s a learning curve. Also realize that the cloud is not a static entity like your data center. It continues to become more featureful. In 2015 AWS released 722 new features and services, which gives enterprises ample opportunity to continually optimize their SAP environments.

Third, think about your SAP Landscape and identify the areas you would like to improve or solutions you want to add but can’t today. We see a number of customers that want to improve their disaster-recovery plans, others who want to avoid yet another hardware refresh, and still others looking to take advantage of the latest SAP HANA solutions.

Finally, find the right expertise to help you in this journey. Consider how you might leverage new or existing partners. Brooks Brothers, for example, have implemented SAP on AWS on their own. Other companies, like Seaco, have found partners to be useful entities, as is the case in their relationship with Lemongrass, one of our SAP on AWS partners. However you prefer to proceed, know that you can find the right level of expertise from AWS and the partner ecosystem. A list of our SAP partners can be found here.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll dive into the following three themes:
 
1. How companies are implementing new SAP environments in the cloud. In this upcoming post, we take a deeper look at Brook Brothers, a 138-year-old retail brand that began their Journey to the cloud by implementing their CRM on SAP HANA on AWS.

2. How companies are migrating existing SAP environments to the cloud. This upcoming post will explore a couple examples of organizations who are migrating their existing SAP Landscapes to AWS. We will expand on the Seaco example, and explore how the biggest container-leasing company in the world leverages AWS to run SAP. We will also share a few other examples and trends that highlight the speed at which enterprises are migrating their SAP Landscapes to AWS.

3. How companies optimize their SAP environments in the cloud. In this upcoming post, we’ll look at what happens after you’re running your SAP environment on AWS. We will touch on the continuous optimization process SAP customers use to optimize their environment and costs using automation and on-demand infrastructure as their business experiences peaks and valleys.
 
We’d love to hear what other topics that you’d like to see covered as part of this series. Let us know!

Fernando Castillo
[email protected]
@castillofer