Today at SAP TechEd 2025, we are excited to share the next evolution of the Microsoft-SAP partnership. Building on decades of collaboration, we continue to advance RISE with SAP on Azure and deepen integrations with SAP S/4HANA Cloud public edition. Our latest innovations deliver enhanced security for SAP and non-SAP workloads, while unified analytics and AI-driven Copilot experiences empower customers to make smarter decisions.
These advancements are designed to help customers accelerate their digital transformation, drive operational excellence, and unlock new business value.
Customer Spotlight: Medline
Medline’s SAP transformation on Microsoft Azure is fueling new levels of agility and intelligence across its operations with SAP on Azure. The company’s migration boosted system resilience, improved key SAP workload transaction times by more than 80% and enabled real-time collaboration and predictive analytics for clinicians and business users - laying the groundwork to extend these insights through Copilot and Azure AI.
“When we partnered on the migration, it ushered in a completely new way in which Microsoft and Medline work together. It became a partnership, with the cloud migration becoming a stepping stone to bigger and brighter, more business-outcome–driven engagements.”
— Jason Kaley, SVP, IT Operations & Architecture, Medline
Customer Spotlight: Commerz Real
Commerz Real, a German financial services firm specializing in real estate, infrastructure, and leasing, modernized its SAP infrastructure by migrating its complete SAP landscape to SAP RISE on Azure. Built to address stringent regulatory, security, and performance demands, the platform delivers high scalability, real-time monitoring, and faster, more stable operations.
“The decision to use Microsoft Azure was a deliberate one. In the past, security concerns and strict regulatory requirements kept us from moving SAP to the cloud. Today we say: If you don’t do that, you won’t survive in the market.”
— Nadine Felderer, Head of SAP Services, Commerz Real
We are pleased to announce additional SAP with Microsoft product updates and details to further help customers innovate on the most trusted cloud for SAP.
- Bi-directional Agent to Agent communication between Microsoft Copilot and SAP Joule. Enterprise-ready SAP API enablement for AI through MCP in Azure API Management.
- General Availability of our agentless Sentinel for SAP data connector with significantly simpler onboarding through SAP Integration Suite. Ready for the future.
- SAP released S/4HANA Cloud public edition for our Sentinel Solution for SAP.
- Microsoft Entra ID advances SAP identity governance with new OAuth 2.0 support, SAP IAG integration preview, and expanded SAP Access Control migration for unified, secure access.
- Advanced support for High Availability with SAP ASE (Sybase) database backup on Azure Backup.
- SAP Deployment Automation Framework now supports highly available scale-out architectures with HANA System Replication for large-scale resilient configurations.
- SAP Testing Automation Framework enhances high availability testing with offline Pacemaker cluster validation for RHEL/SUSE, and native Linux-based validation tools quality checks
- Enhanced SAP Inventory and Observability Dashboard to reduce operational risk, and supports production-ready SAP systems, along with a customizable Windows Quality Checks PowerShell template.
Let's dive into the summary details of product updates and services.
Extend and Innovate and Secure
Copilot Studio and SAP Joule
Since the release of the Joule and Copilot integration earlier this year, we have seen great interest and adoption with customers and partners. The Joule as a host integration is planned to be released later this year. Integrating Joule with Microsoft 365 Copilot | SAP Help Portal
For customers on their journey towards RISE and GROW, we also worked on the Azure API Management team to enable the exposure of SAP OData Services from your SAP Systems as an MCP server which then can be consumed in Copilot using Microsoft Copilot Studio. This enables the interaction of end-users with their SAP system based on any OData services. For more details, check out Expose REST API in API Management as MCP server and Copilot + SAP: Azure API Management, MCP and SAP OData.
To simplify the integration and help customers and partners get started faster, we are releasing preconfigured Copilot Studio Agent that can orchestrate over other agents like SAP, Fabric and Microsoft 365. Customers can use these agents out of the box or use them as a foundation to extend and build their own Copilot Agents.
Microsoft Security for SAP
Security is being reengineered for the AI era - moving beyond static, rule-bound controls and after-the-fact response toward platform-led, machine-speed defense.
Attackers think in graphs - Microsoft does too. We are bringing relationship-aware context to Microsoft Security suite - so defenders and AI can see connections, understand the impact of a potential compromise (blast radius), and act faster across pre-breach and post-breach scenarios.
- SAP S/4HANA Cloud public edition Add-on for Microsoft Sentinel for SAP (preview): Enables deep, native integration of SAP telemetry with Sentinel, bringing advanced threat detection, investigation, and response to SAP workloads running in the cloud.
- Microsoft Sentinel for SAP Agentless Data Connector: Now generally available, the agentless connector significantly simplifies deployment while delivering secure, high-fidelity ingestion of SAP audit and application logs into Sentinel.
- Expanded Security Guidance: Enhanced guidance for Microsoft Defender, Ransomware Protection, and Cyber Defense for SAP, helping customers implement best practices for hardening SAP environments and responding to evolving threats.
- Cost-Efficient Long-Term Log Storage: Organizations can now take advantage of Sentinel Data Lake to retain SAP logs for 12 years at scale for compliance (NIS2, DORA) and forensic use cases - at a fraction of traditional storage costs.
- Purview shipping most requested features updates for our existing SAP connectors (SNC mode support in preview, CDS view support, and scoped metadata scanning) and a new connector for BW/4HANA.
SAP has reiterated end of maintenance for SAP Identity Management (SAP IDM) by end of 2027 and is collaborating with Microsoft so customers can migrate identity scenarios to Microsoft Entra ID as the recommended successor approach.
- Provisioning backbone in place: Microsoft Entra released new features for the built‑in connector for SAP Cloud Identity Services (CIS) to support authentication with OAuth 2.0, and provisioning of groups to streamline authorization management in downstream SAP targets like SAP S/4HANA and SAP BTP, enabling HR‑driven, end‑to‑end identity lifecycles.
- Private Preview: Microsoft Entra Integration with SAP IAG: The private preview for Microsoft Entra integration with SAP Identity Access Governance (IAG) is now underway. Selected customers are testing Entra ID Governance access packages that include SAP IAG roles as resources, routing of access approvals through SAP IAG, and provisioning of roles across both systems. Sign-Up here.
- Enhanced Integration Scope with SAP Access Control (AC): Driven by direct customer feedback, Microsoft and SAP are expanding the migration and integration scope to include SAP Access Control (AC). This enhancement will enable comprehensive access management, risk analysis, and policy enforcement on-premises, leveraging Microsoft Entra’s governance capabilities for improved security and compliance.
Together, these innovations give customers end-to-end visibility and protection across SAP landscapes—spanning public cloud, hybrid, and on-premises deployments.
SAP on Azure Software Products and Services
Azure Backup for SAP
We are committed to expanding backup support for additional SAP workloads. Following the general availability of ASE backup, we have further enhanced its capabilities with the introduction of high availability configuration support. This enhancement delivers automatic backup support for SAP systems setup with Replication Server, ensuring seamless protection after failover or failback events without the need for manual intervention. As a result, users benefit from immediate and continuous data protection, along with a simplified restore process using a single backup chain.
We have expanded our Snapshot backup capability for SAP HANA by adding Recovery Services Vault support. This will help customers store their snapshot backups with long term retention, while gaining protection from Ransomware attacks. Vault support brings in capabilities like immutability, soft-delete enablement, multi-user-authorization to further safeguard the data.
We have also launched the preview for “Scale-out” support configurations for SAP HANA streaming backup, expanding our overall topology support.
SAP Deployment Automation Framework
We are releasing updates to the SAP Deployment Automation Framework (SDAF) and SAP Testing Automation Framework (STAF) that expand testing coverage, improve reliability, and provide additional deployment flexibility for SAP environments on Azure.
SAP Deployment Automation Framework (SDAF)
SDAF deployment and configuration scenarios now include scale-out architectures with HANA System Replication (HSR). This enhancement addresses resiliency requirements for large-scale deployments requiring multi-node scale-out configurations with built-in replication capabilities.
SDAF now supports GitHub Actions in addition to existing deployment methods including Azure DevOps pipelines, CLI scripts, and the WebApp interface. Organizations using GitHub for source control and infrastructure management can now deploy and manage SAP environments using their existing workflows and tooling preferences.
SAP Testing Automation Framework (STAF)
STAF now supports offline validation for SAP Pacemaker clusters. This capability enables testing of resource agent failover mechanisms without executing live cluster operations, reducing risk during validation cycles and allowing for pre-deployment verification of high availability configurations.
The high availability testing suite has been updated to include SAPHanaSr-ANGI tests, ensuring compatibility with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 and SAP HANA 2.0 SP5 environments. This update addresses the requirements of organizations running current SAP HANA releases on modern SUSE distributions.
Configuration checks in preview, represents a rewrite of the open-source Quality Checks tool, now integrated as a native capability within STAF. This tool validates SAP on Azure installations against Microsoft reference architecture and configuration guidance.
Azure Center and Azure Monitor for SAP Solutions
We are pleased to share that Azure Center for SAP solutions (ACSS) is now available in Italy North, providing end-to-end SAP workload management to more customers across Europe.
Additionally, Azure Monitor for SAP solutions (AMS) is now available in Italy North. AMS continues to help SAP customers reliably monitor their mission-critical workloads on Azure with comprehensive insights.
Get started:
- Azure Center for SAP solutions | Microsoft Learn
- What is Azure Monitor for SAP solutions? | Microsoft Learn
- Azure Portal
Azure Center for SAP solutions Tools and Frameworks
We have refreshed our SAP on Azure Well-Architected Framework and the accompanying SAP on Azure Assessment to reflect the latest platform guidance. The update aligns with recent Azure innovations—including VMSS Flex, Premium SSD v2, Capacity Reservation Groups, Mv3-series, and NVMe-based SKUs—so architects and admins can plan and deploy with current best practices. The assessment is also now surfaced on the main Assessments hub for easier access and can be used as a repeatable checkpoint throughout your SAP deployment lifecycle.
Quality Checks (PowerShell) for windows: We have published a lightweight, read-only script for customers running SAP on Windows and SQL Server on Microsoft Azure. It performs post-provisioning health checks and outputs a color-coded HTML report plus JSON. Use it as a baseline template—customize the thresholds to your environment, and feel free to contribute enhancements to cover your configuration requirements.
Observability Dashboard: Based on customer feedback, we have expanded the dashboard to surface design-impacting signals for running specialized workloads on Azure. It now offers Overview, Security, Networking, and Inventory views, plus extended reports for managers and hands-on engineers. Updates make it easier to review VM redundancy, spot orphaned resources, see Capacity Reservation Groups with their associated VMs in the primary region, and count Public IPs on the Basic SKU—helping you stay on top of infrastructure hygiene and avoid unsupported configurations.
SAP + Microsoft Co-Innovations
Microsoft and SAP are always working on new solutions to help our customers adapt and grow their businesses in several areas including AI, Business Suite, Data, Cloud ERP, Security, SAP BTP, among others. Recently, we started a new era of Agentic AIOps collaboration between SAP and Microsoft with fully orchestrated multi-agent ecosystem for mission critical workload. Please check out this blog to learn more.
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