Getting Beyond the Top 4 Barriers to SAP Cloud Migration

Migrating your SAP system to the cloud represents a significant investment of time and financing for any business. Because of the perceived risk, many companies continue to procrastinate in making this move. By stalling, they are missing out on the significant benefits other businesses now enjoy. Let’s take a look at the top barriers to cloud migration and how you can overcome them.

Defining the Top 4 Barriers to Cloud Migration

Fear dominates the list of reasons for resisting the move to the cloud. Based on customer research, here are the top obstacles we’ve been able to identify.

• Resident Knowledge – Many companies fear that their in-house teams do not possess the necessary skills or experience to manage a cloud-based infrastructure. They operate within their on-premise comfort zone, relying on the legacy skills of a select few people who either set up the system or have been working within it for a significant period of time. Unfortunately, they may not truly understand that the cloud is NOT just another technology infrastructure platform.
• Cloud Strategy – Sometimes leadership gets hung up on their fears about the necessary choices surrounding a cloud migration. Should they adopt a public cloud vs a private cloud vs a hybrid strategy? Do they go with a single service provider or opt for multiple service providers? Should the ownership of the process remain in the IT department, or should they put a purpose-specific, cross-functional team in place? Many strategies get stalled just trying to answer these basic questions.
• Downtime – Fear of unplanned downtime becomes a mantra for the anti-cloud faction. They claim that they can better control outages when the system is kept on-premise with their in-house experts (see Resident Knowledge above). This is especially true for manufacturing sites who have been resistant to IoT (Internet of Things) configurations taking virtual control over production lines.
• Security – Fear of cyber attacks also ranks high on the barriers list. Putting sensitive data – either customers’ personal data or protected proprietary information – into a virtual vault raises concerns about making that data more accessible to blackhat hackers or competitors looking for and a business edge.

How about you? Do you see yourself fighting against any of these top barriers? Would you like to go over, under, around or through these barriers? The good news is you can.

Do the Benefits Outweigh the Risks?

SAP cloud migrations are not exactly new. Syntax has 50 years of experience in this arena and there are thousands of businesses that have successfully accomplished this transformation. That means we’ve learned critical things along the way and actually gathered a number of hard data points around the beneficial value of an SAP cloud migration.

For example, most migrated operations report a higher level of flexibility and agility in managing their SAP infrastructure. Resources that formerly had to spend a lot of time keeping up with physical installations can re-focus their energies on solving more strategic issues. They have more time to prepare for large-scale changes brought on by shifting business operations (new technology, acquisitions, product demand fluctuations, regulatory demands, and more). That makes them much more responsive in today’s fast-paced business environment.

Another big advantage is the economics of a migration. By eliminating an on-premise installation, you can significantly reduce hardware acquisition and maintenance costs. No more worrying about integrating older machinery with newer, better, more complex models. No more accommodating the space, power, and temperature-control needs of data operations and storage. Plus, you can shift your balance sheet from capital expenditures (CapEx) to operational expenditures (OpEx), with all the tax and cash flow opportunities that brings.

Our customers also report new opportunities for innovation. Setting up a cloud-based SAP system makes more of your operational data more accessible. You’ll be better able to harness the technology to make better business decisions. You’ll be more prepared to drive business growth, improve your customers’ experiences, find new uses for your products or adjust to shifting market demands. Plus, by bringing together multiple voices from across the company, you may even find some synergies not possible with all groups operating in silos.

Roan Low, Syntax Cloud Solution Architect, talks about getting started with your SAP migration project.

How Do I Get There?

First and foremost – don’t feel like you have to do this alone. Learn from the experience of your peers and experts like the 50-year veterans at Syntax. We’ve crafted a turnkey solution for a production-ready, automated, predictive model that integrates all we’ve learned from previous migrations, big and small. Our team includes SAP, AWS, Azure, and cloud-certified experts and we have proven templates for operational service level agreements (SLAs) for optimum efficiency.

Second, create effective governance policies. Establish your decision-making team and give them the authority and accountability to set data maintenance and data retention protocols with defined timelines. Audit your landscape and eliminate outdated or redundant applications within or connected to your SAP system. Assess your current and future interdependencies and develop a phased cloud integration plan which accounts for the needs of all your stakeholders In the most proficient way.