Your Guide to Successfully Migrating Your ERP to the Cloud

Discover how your enterprise can make the transition from on-premise to ERP cloud, and transform your entire organization easier and with less risky.

Re-watch the full webinar, now available on-demand: “Webinar: Moving Your ERP to the Cloud and Cloud Hosting with Illumiti”

Moving to the cloud is an enormous and challenging endeavor. And as more and more companies dedicate a substantial percentage of their IT budgets to digitally transform their operations, there is no doubt how beneficial the change will be for their overall Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) initiatives. From accounting to workforce management, ERP solutions deliver centralized control, increased efficiency, and greater operational visibility, and the cloud is making everything so much easier.

Market Trends

If you’re making the leap to cloud or considering it, you’re not alone. And aside from the unique set of challenges that can arise—security, compliance, operational disruption, downtime, budget constraints—cloud is quickly taking centerstage as part of the digital journey for many organizations.

• 33% of all North American enterprises are already broadly deploying production workloads in the cloud, taking their business applications and running them in the cloud.
• 20% of North American enterprise are actually going with a strategy of public cloud only.

• North America is leading the charge over other worldwide regions, particularly Western Europe and Asia Pacific.
• According to Gartner, public cloud services, the market value is approaching $300 billion (USD) and projected to that worldwide in 2021—it’s expected that IaaS and related management services to grow 75% between 2019 and 2022.

Why Run ERP in the Cloud?

Why are companies looking to run ERP in the cloud? From our perspective, and experience, the interest is huge and this is originating from our clients and prospects—they are showing an eagerness to run their SAP systems in the cloud.

These three key reasons why cloud is so interesting, and Illumiti is experiencing increasing interest from its customers and prospects in the potential to run ERP in the Cloud:

• Reducing dependency on on-premise data centres and internal IT staff.
• Improved availability and disaster recovery.
• Greater flexibility to grow and evolve.

The Evolution of Hosting Services

Traditionally, as an SAP services company, we partner with hosting companies to deliver a valuable, much needed service to our customers with numerous benefits:

• Hosting companies specialize in building and managing infrastructure (not in SAP).
• SAP services companies like Illumiti specialize in the application solution and supporting products (not IT infrastructure management).
• Each has different customer contracts with different service levels
• Each runs its own set of monitoring tools to assess the “health” of its environment

The customer directly “owns” application availability and service providers have different customer contracts with different service levels with each running its own set of monitoring tools to assess the health of its environment.

When it comes to traditional SAP Hosting and Application Support, hyper-scaler s are significantly disrupting the landscape, and the trend is growing. Hyper-scaler s provide:

• Much greater flexibility in hardware configuration and deployment options.
• Global high-speed networks.
• Improved resilience at lower costs.
• PaaS, data access, application development and integration.
• Thoroughness by staying up-to-date on changes to technology.
• Pay-per-use pricing model.

Illumiti’s SAP Public Cloud Hosting Services

Illumiti’s public cloud hosting service compliments our Application Management and Enhancement Services (AMES) offering, which we've run for a long time, and which most of our SAP customers leverage. AMES delivers a one-stop integrated IT and application management solution that:

• Covers SAP solutions from the hardware to the application.
• Provides managed infrastructure for non-SAP workloads.
• Gives access to other leading services providers like Softtek, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Amazon Web Services (AWS).
• Delivers a very high level of service availability and reliability at an affordable cost.
• Provides flexibility to support changing needs with future evolution and growth.

Regarding how the SAP environments look like when they're implemented in a cloud environment, we typically have three tier environments—production, development, and quality assurance (differences will be evident depending how HANA or ECC).

Example: S/4HANA Production System Landscape (HA and DR)

• Hypescalers provide High Availability (HA) and Disaster Recovery (DR) options through availability zones.
• HA and DR are optional and each can be added to the standard configuration without the other.
• Example hyper-scaler SL0:
  • Compute engine in a single zone – 99.5% availability (3:36 hours/month).
  • Compute engine in primary and HA – 99.99% availability (4.3 minutes/month).

Illumiti SAP Public Cloud Hosting – Application Level Service Level Agreements (SLO)

Our public cloud hosting offering also provides an application and surface level objective for S/4HANA and ECC applications:

• Initial response time <= 30 min
• Recovery Time Objective (RTO)
  • Standard: <= 4 hours
  • With HA: <= 1 minute
  • In case of disaster: <= 8 hours
• Recovery Point Objective (RPO)
  • Standard: <= 1 hour
  • With HA: <= 5 minutes
  • In case of disaster: <= 1 hour
• Application Availability
  • Standard: 99.5%
  • With HA: 99.9%

Illumiti SAP Public Cloud Hosting – A Cost-effective Approach

In addition to having the unique capability of providing a promise at the application availability level, SAP also provides hosting services for S/4HANA in the cloud.

• Indicative total hosting price increments:
  • To add DR: ~10% of standard
  • To add HA (for core servers): ~20% of standard

Migration Approach and Hosting Services Scope

When migrating SAP ECC or S/4HANA to the Cloud, we take a simple tactic to migration and upgrading—a lift and shift approach—by combining the two projects into one to create cost savings. By minimizing the testing efforts here, we minimize costs as well.

• For existing SAP customers:
  • Lift and shift (simplest and lowest cost)
  • Migrate and upgrade (opportunity to add business value and become current in your SAP footprint)
• For new customers:
  • Greenfield implementation
• Hyper-scaler deployment is gradual and saves cost

Illumiti AMES and Cloud Hosting Services

Our AMES offering provides our customers continued support post go-live.

Delivery Experience and What Makes Our Offering Unique

Illumiti has a successful track record of over the past 10 plus providing AMES’ level of quality service and delivery for SAP customers, and we’re SAP Partner Centre of Excellence (PCoE) certified. Additionally:

• We have a very high level of customer satisfaction with a 2019 Net Promoter Score of 52.
• Shared Customer Support Manager, common processes and infrastructure between AMES and IT Managed Services to deliver the benefits of Illumiti accountability for the entire SAP solution technology stack at the server level.

Illumiti’s team includes consultants with SAP, GCP, and AWS solution architect certifications and has delivered SAP ECC and S/4HANA migrations, implementations, and sandbox projects to hyper-scaler environments for 10 customers

Illumiti also leverages its extensive ITIM and ITO experience with Softtek to deliver the IT Managed Services component of its SAP Public Cloud Hosting offering. Softtek has:

• Acted as an integral part of Illumiti’s AMES team since 2012.
• Over 3,000 employees specializing in ITIM services.
• Has multiple architects with AWS, GCP, and Azure certifications, in addition to consultants with SAP Basis, development, and functional skills.
• A team supporting Illumiti based in Aguascalientes, Mexico.

Softtek is certified in ISO/IEC 27001:2013 (information security) and ISO/IEC 20000-1 (IT service management) and has a broad set of complementary skills and experiences that can be called upon if and when needs arise.

What makes Illumiti SAP Public Cloud Hosting unique?

SAP Public Cloud complements Illumiti’s AMES offering by providing the firm with accountability for the full SAP technology stack, from hardware to the implementation of the S/4HANA solution. We have the ability to support very stringent SLOs where needed—at the SAP application availability level and not just at the infrastructure availability level—providing 99.9% at a reasonable incremental price. Additionally:

• We have the flexibility to support changing needs and ad-hoc requests as and when required, and to leverage additional skillsets from both Illumiti and Softtek.
• Together we provide extensive experience and a track record for delivering quality service on top of very high-performance and high-availability GCP or AWS infrastructure.

 For additional details, watch the full webinar now, on-demand and free.

About the Author

Andrew Koo, Senior Director, Consulting, brings more than 25 years of SAP experience and is currently focused on providing digital transformation solutions for Illumiti’s growing customer base where he manages the firm’s Cloud Services offering. By migrating to Illumiti’s Cloud solution, Andrew helps ensure that customers will realize efficiencies in system reliability and flexibility while reducing operational costs.