Joao Couto VP, SAP Business Unit, Microsoft
This blog post has been co-authored by Prakash Pattaiyan, Principal Program Manager, SAP on Azure
Enterprises are rapidly adopting cloud, reducing their reliance on in-house managed infrastructure by turning to Microsoft Azure to benefit from hyperscale features, agility, and gain competitive advantage. Yet, for organizations running mission-critical instances such as SAP, the journey to cloud can appear to be complex with high risk and uncertainty.
Migrating SAP systems to the cloud comes with unique business and technical challenges as compared to other enterprise applications. Most organizations require an accelerated timeline, from discovery to go live, with zero to no downtime and implementation of best practices.
Transforming your SAP to cloud will require a fundamental examination of your infrastructure, data and business processes. To accelerate this phase, teams will need to quickly find inventory and ensure target architecture is properly sized to realize the full benefits of SAP on Azure. Post migration planning, IT organizations should look to avoid the high risk and uncertainty of the cloud migration by using repeatable processes and implementation of best practices from a Microsoft and SAP certified solution.
Customers need a solution that minimizes the risk and reduces cost by leveraging an automation factory that ensures repeatability and scalability all while achieving a technically and financially optimized SAP on Azure environment. To reduce the complexity, accelerate the timeline and ensure success, Microsoft has partnered with Protera, an SAP-certified, Microsoft Gold Cloud Partner as a Preferred Partner for SAP migrations to Azure.
Leveraging Automation to Accelerate Migration and Reduce Complexity
Based on the experience of over 500 migrations and management of over 2500 systems, Protera has developed a smarter way to migrate and manage SAP on Azure combining the most up-to-date knowledge of SAP and Azure with a powerful platform, Protera FlexBridge®. Customers choosing Microsoft Azure can take advantage of Protera services and Protera FlexBridge® to shorten their journey to Azure and modernize their SAP operations to quickly achieve their transformation objectives with the following:
SAP on Azure Transformation Assessment Customers currently running SAP use the Protera FlexBridge® platform to generate and validate their transformation plans to Azure, whether As-Is, Technical, SAP HANA or SAP S/4HANA.
The assessment includes:
- Current state analysis, migration methodology, project timeline, and migration readiness
- Collection of customer environment data including hypervisor, operating system, database, network, storage, and application metrics by utilizing Azure Migrate and FlexBridge ABAP Assessment App
- Possible Transformations options are provided for the customer’s SAP Applications
- Target architecture table and diagram showing type and version of operating system, database, SAP application Azure VM SKU, storage SKU, and network interfaces
- Cost for migration, Azure IaaS with PAYGO and Reserved terms, and managed services
Clarification of customer engagement (testing, etc.) defining roles & responsibilities for the migration project; Recommendations on backup and security
Intelligent Provisioning and Migration Quickly and securely migrate and optimize your SAP and related applications on Azure using powerful automations powered by Protera FlexBridge® which includes:
- Rapid provisioning of Azure infrastructure including: networking, security groups, VMs built from customer or Marketplace images and storage
- Migration automation to orchestrate the steps to migrate each server to Azure by using certified tools including Azure Migrate, SAP SWPM and SAP SUM and monitor migration health
Managed SAP on Azure Services Run SAP and related systems on Azure at a lower cost, increased performance, higher service level\s and greater visibility, with continuous optimization using automations to operate consistently at scale. Services include:
- Dashboard of operational metrics including SLA, performance metrics for Azure as well as SAP application performance
- Service desk integration to customers’ service desk
- Azure spend analysis and optimization
- SAP Maintenance Automation
- Operating System, Database and SAP patching
- SAP System Copy
- Environment snoozing to reduce cost
Through the preferred partnership between Microsoft and Protera, multiple teams at both companies are committed to work together to simplify and accelerate SAP migrations to Azure for our customers using the powerful automation tool Protera FlexBridge®. Microsoft customers can leverage this expanded partnership to take advantage of the repeatable, automated, low risk migration methods that fit to the approved templates of SAP and Microsoft. We are very excited to have Protera as Microsoft’s Preferred Partner for SAP on Azure migrations.
Learn More
If you would like to learn more about Protera
eBook: A Smarter Cloud for Your SAP
Solution Brief: Protera Flexbridge® for SAP on Azure
To learn more about migrating SAP on Azure, visit:
SAP on Azure Migration – SAP Intelligent Enterprise | Microsoft Azure
