Moving to the Cloud

Tips for implementation success when you migrate SAP to the cloud

Currently there’s a mass migration of SAP from on-premise hardware to a scalable cloud model. This is a change that brings many benefits. It boosts resilience and agility, but also reduces costs, because the necessary hardware to stay on premises is getting prohibitively expensive.

Moreover, the advanced analytics of the newer SAP solutions and their intelligent and real-time applications work much better on the cloud.

You have to start by studying your data in depth. Before you even start the migration, you have to know your data and what you want it to do for you. At the same time you also have to be open to changing some of your processes to take advantage of what the new technology has to offer.

Analise why you need to make the change: scalability, performance, accessibility, flexibility, hassle-free upgrades? Remove all data anomalies through a cleansing program.

What critical data assets do you have across systems and premises? You don’t have to do it all at the same time. A phased deployment avoids unnecessary risks and benefits a smooth adoption by the HR team. Planning is crucial.

Prime communication and organisation so that everybody starts using the cloud as soon as possible. Different people will have different roles. Identify them early to avoid confusion later.

When migrating your SAP applications to the cloud, timing is everything. Consider factors like new product release, big projects in the lineup...

Lift and shift doesn’t work on SAP to cloud migrations, be ready to change the database and the operating system. You may have to do additional testing as well.

Have a good infrastructure design ready to avoid performance issues and combine your internal IT skills with experts on SAP system upgrades to have a smooth transition.