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DERRICK DAY: I'm Derrick Day, practice director for SAP
on GCP for HCL Technologies.
Today, I will be talking about the journey of SAP
from on-premise to the Cloud.
In on-premise hosting, you're essentially landlocked.
You have no ability for growth and very little flexibility.
The Cloud allows you to grow as your business grows
and to evolve with the market.
And let's talk about innovation.
You need to be on a cloud platform that
is committed to innovation.
As technology advances, so does the cloud.
Your cloud provider should quickly embrace and adopt
technological advancements that will give you
the reliability you demand while allowing you to be
more effective and competitive.
In on-premise deployments, you're
locked into specific technologies
that can hinder your agility.
The Cloud, on the other hand, gives you the flexibility
to change and to grow.
Certain cloud platforms make it easier for large enterprises
to innovate.
Make sure your cloud platform has the best backbone
infrastructure-- that is, their own fiber network.
This way, they don't have to process
data between networks, which ensures
you get the best performance.
Make sure they have the tools built in to effectively migrate
your SAP workloads to cloud and manage these workloads
once they're on cloud.
This will increase the efficiency of your SAP journey.
If you're with a cloud platform that
has these tools fully integrated, you set up once
and you're ready to roll.
To me, this is the money shot.
And when it comes to data, make sure your cloud
vendor knows the value and importance of data.
Certain cloud vendors know more than others
when it comes to data.
If your cloud platform has expertise in their data
and managing their data and they know
how to unlock the value of their data,
chances are the tools they built will
help you manage and analyze your data effectively.
You want to leverage SAP to do more than just data recording.
You want it to automate critical business decisions as well.
It's important to keep these considerations in mind
and choose the cloud platform that
is the best one-stop shop for you when it comes to SAP.
Some customers hesitate on the journey
to cloud because of lack of awareness.
There are a ton of cloud offerings out here,
and cloud providers.
And you have to do your due diligence
to make sure that you find the cloud provider that
provides the best custom solution for your SAP journey.
Don't fall into the trap of going with who's first
or with who's best.
Always make sure that you find what works best for you.
When you look at storage, everyone has SSD.
SAP requires SSD for its HANA solutions.
But all SSD is not created equal.
Some cloud vendors have two or three flavors
to choose from and will undersell the storage
because it looks cost-effective, then
convince you to upgrade later in order
to get the added performance.
Some have one SSD with higher performance
than the best of the others.
Look for the highest quality SSD available,
the one that exceeds all SAP requirements
and exceeds all of your individual needs.
And when you look at infrastructure,
again, certain clouds are as landlocked
as on-premise servers.
Look for a cloud provider that has their own architecture.
Look for day-to-day reliability and the ability to patch
and update with no downtime.
And finally, look for the provider that affords you
the greatest scalability, flexibility, agility,
and future-proofs your solution.
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