While the majority of SAP applications are still housed on-premise, 70 percent of those responsible for SAP believe migrating to the public cloud will be more beneficial than keeping it on-premise, according to a new report from Ensono
Ensono found that 61 percent stated that migrating SAP to public cloud is critical for business success.
There was consensus amongst the 100 IT leaders responsible for SAP within UK enterprise that public cloud provides businesses with opportunities. Almost 20 percent of those surveyed had one or more SAP application already hosted on public cloud and this is set to increase by 79 percent in the next two years as enterprise organisations launch their migration plans. This indicates that, following many years of barriers to public cloud such as security, loss of control and regulation, customers are edging towards public cloud maturity.
Additionally, 16 percent of respondents felt migrating to public cloud would address the needs of business leaders, showing an appetite and involvement from business leaders with SAP, often a mission critical part of the business. This is especially true in an era where operations have had to focus on digital due to the changing requirements brought on by the pandemic.
In addition to business drivers, respondents identified clear technology drivers, too. When asked what technology benefits migrating SAP to Azure would bring, the IT leaders confirmed they will be doing so to take advantage of IoT (44 percent); for security advantages (37 percent); to take advantage of AI and ML (33 percent); integration with other workloads (29 percent); scalability (28 percent); complexity reduction (23 percent); accessing data lakes outside of the SAP ecosystem (21 per cent); to prepare for SAP S/4 HANA migration (17 percent).
Given the dominance of public cloud for other applications, it is little surprise that this transformation is imminent. 85 percent of respondents stated that cloud technology, above all others, is the most important technology for the future of their organisation.
Sean Roberts, General Manager, Public Cloud at Ensono said: “SAP is the lifeblood of many businesses and represents the centre of gravity within the IT estate. As organisations mature in their cloud journey, many are facing a fundamental question; to continue to invest and renew their SAP hardware and software assets where they are or make a strategic shift and move these to the public cloud.”
