4    SAP BW/4HANA in the Cloud

With the rise of cloud deployments, it’s important to consider whether to deploy SAP BW/4HANA on-premise or in the cloud. In this chapter, we’ll discuss the latter option.

SAP designed SAP BW/4HANA for deployment in the cloud. As of April 2017, there aren’t a lot of differences between SAP BW 7.5 powered by SAP HANA and SAP BW/4HANA, but some of the developments that SAP has promised around data integration will provide flexibility to help integrate SAP BW/4HANA in cloud systems. You can deploy SAP BW/4HANA on the following cloud offerings, among others:

• SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud
• Amazon Web Services (AWS)
• Microsoft Azure
• Virtustream by Dell EMC

Many of the providers offer infrastructure as a service (IaaS); hence, installing the SAP system still must be performed as described in Chapter 3.

In this chapter, we’ll begin by discussing some of the criteria for choosing a cloud provider before looking at some specific providers. We’ll end the chapter by briefly walking through the SAP BW/4HANA cloud deployment steps.

4.1    Choosing a Cloud Provider

Choosing a cloud provider is generally a separate process from SAP BW/4HANA system deployment. This section will cover some of the main selection criteria. However, before considering specific selection criteria, it’s important for a company to define a cloud strategy.

Defining a company strategy for the cloud is recommended to avoid costly projects and later redeployments caused by changes in requirements and partners.

Several cloud providers offer cloud and datacenter strategy workshops that can provide initial strategy input and answer questions related to the specific provider.

The workshops normally include the following elements:

• An analysis of your business drivers, priorities, investment objectives, and technology enablers
• Enabling a high-level IT strategy that supports your specific business objectives, such as market differentiation, innovation, and cost-savings
• Determining the appropriate action plan for your organization to meet the outlined goals and priorities

The strategy should include a long-term vision of where the company wants to go with cloud deployments and a roadmap for how to get there.

We generally recommend starting small and growing the cloud footprint, and most deployments we’ve been involved in have been hybrid cloud deployments that make use of both on-premise and cloud.

With the cloud strategy in place, a more specific selection process to find a primary cloud provider follows. From what we’ve seen in the marketplace, most companies might have a primary and a secondary cloud provider, depending on the size of the company and the offerings provided. Now, in the following subsections, let’s look at the primary cloud provider selection criteria:

• Performance
• Technology and certification
• Service level
• Ecosystem and community
• Security
• Cost
• Preferred providers

4.1.1    Performance

Performance is always a main concern when moving to a cloud provider. Performance is multifaceted: Both agility in deploying a new system and the technical performance of the hardware used plays a role in the overall performance rating. Performance issues include the geographical distance of the application and data to the end user, network performance within the cloud provider and to the end users, and disk I/O access speed between the compute and storage subsystems. Services and research reports such as CloudSleuth and CloudHarmony have attempted to measure the performance of cloud providers from various locations and for different application use cases.

4.1.2    Technology and Certification

Some cloud providers have focused their offerings on specific applications. Because we’re looking at deploying SAP BW/4HANA, it’s important to verify that the provider has experience with and is SAP-certified for SAP HANA deployments.

In addition to the certification, it’s also important to look at the tools and APIs provided for managing the cloud platform.

4.1.3    Service-Level Agreements and Reliability

Cloud providers offer guarantees for levels of service; the guarantee is only an indication of the consequences when the service fails, however, and you should compare the consequences with the service-level agreement (SLA) before reading too much into the numbers provided. A high SLA does not mean much unless there’s a significant penalty when the service is down unexpectedly. We recommend talking with existing customers and using comparison services such as CloudSleuth and CloudHarmony.

4.1.4    Ecosystem and Community

Cloud providers all offer tools and APIs to build and manage applications. If you’ve started building tools on one provider’s APIs, it can be costly to rebuild on another provider’s APIs.

Amazon, Virtustream, and Azure allow customers to implement in-house clouds using their tools and APIs. This allows for hybrid cloud deployments, with some systems in the cloud and others on-premise.

4.1.5    Security and Compliance

Two of the biggest barriers for companies considering cloud computing continue to be security and compliance. The real concern for enterprises is not truly security threats themselves, but rather the company’s inability to achieve compliance with security-related standards. Many cloud providers have security and compliance standards that exceed what companies have been able to build internally, so this concern should be reviewed and an appropriate provider selected that meets or exceeds the standards you want.

4.1.6    Costs

Normally cloud providers are compared on costs, but this isn’t always easy; costing models among cloud providers vary quite a bit. Some providers charge for the capacity you signed up for and other for the capacity you actually use. Providers offer VMs that vary widely in memory capacity, CPU clock speed, and other features. Also, the units provided to customers are often virtualized, creating further confusion as to what the customer is getting and how it might be impacted by shared infrastructure on the same cloud.

One way to measure the cost performance of different cloud providers is to conduct an experiment with the same application or prototype on multiple providers and compare the results. For SAP BW/4HANA, SAP has done this work and certified Azure and Amazon for certain SAP HANA sizes that you can expect to be very similar in performance.

4.1.7    Preferred Providers

Most companies have a list of preferred vendors that they work with, rather than send out requests to all possible vendors that could provide a service. Existing hardware and software providers like HP, IBM, Microsoft, and Dell EMC have cloud offerings that provide a similar setup as Amazon AWS. The most flexible one seems to be Azure, but also Dell EMC’s Virtustream cloud has proven to be flexible specifically for SAP applications for which their tools exceed the capabilities of other providers.

It can sometimes be beneficial to work with providers that you have a long-term relationship with. However, it’s important that a provider choice not made because of personal relationships or because it feels “safe” to choose one of the legacy companies.

Final Selection

When making a final selection, compare all the dimensions of the cloud offering. Once a cloud provider has been selected, it becomes easier to use that provider for subsequent systems because it’s already set up and hence requires less effort to integrate into the network, security, and processes. Many large companies will have more than one provider to ensure that they can get the right costs and have flexibility to move workload between providers if needed.