Role of SAP BTP in Multi-Cloud Strategy and Solutions

Given the rising importance of cloud, businesses want to leverage the right cloud platform-as-a-service (PaaS), infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), or software-as-a-service (SaaS) for the right use case. Each cloud provider has their strengths and weaknesses. Many RISE with SAP customers want improved resilience, increased flexibility/agility, on-demand scalability, compliance/regulations, and cloud-native core applications. These users have to diversify among multiple cloud providers, mitigate their risk by creating proper SLAs, and inquire about cloud provider offerings. This involves evaluating:

• platforms
• services
• savings
• optimizations
• disaster recovery options
• business continuity options for SAP S/4HANA
• how to leverage SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) etc. to create a multi-cloud strategy or multi-cloud solutions

What Is a Multi-Cloud Strategy?

The multi-cloud is basically the use of cloud services from two or more vendors. It offers flexibility to optimize performance, control costs, and leverage the best cloud technologies available. SAP BTP, similarly to SAP S/4HANA, can be deployed on the Microsoft (Azure), Amazon (AWS), or Google (GCP) to create many new and exciting solutions to accelerate your digital transformation journey.

What Is Multi-Cloud Solution?

A multi-cloud solution is a cloud computing solution that is portable across multiple cloud providers' cloud infrastructures. Through its multi-cloud compatibility, SAP BTP lets you choose from different infrastructures, environments, and runtimes. It has three different environments: The Cloud Foundry environment, the Kyma environment, and the ABAP environment. I spend a good deal of my time as an SAP solution architect supporting customers to understand how SAP BTP can be utilized as follows (Figure-1) in the next area of technology adoption to improve business outcomes:

• With multiple cloud providers such as Microsoft Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, Alibaba Cloud, and so on, leveraging their services to create an integrated application.
• To increase the speed of application delivery (reduce development times), replace legacy application code with cloud native code or services, and so on.
• To “keep the core clean” or keep code out of the business SAP S/4HANA system.
• To create new IPs (repeatable offerings, microservices, etc.) that can speed the implementation/integration process or support the AMS business (chatbots, business process automation, etc.) to bring down costs

Figure 1- How SAP Business Technology Platform simplifies S/4HANA journey (Source: SAP) Through my conversations with customers, I’ve realized that there is a lack of knowledge to create multi-cloud strategies or multi-cloud solutions. Many are even unaware of the benefits with Rise with SAP, which includes free SAP BTP credits. Another option, Free tier (Figure-2) from SAP is a great addition as allows customer to try new things and they only pay per use. Figure 2-SAP BTP Free-tier- Key Benefits (Source: SAP) Rise with SAP clearly indicates that SAP does not want to compete with hyperscalers on infrastructure and services. SAP will leverage hyperscalers by moving more of its cloud-based services to their datacenters to offer choice and flexibility to customers to build modern and integrated cloud enterprise software. This will help design the solutions utilizing the strength of both the SAP and hyperscaler (Figure-3). I have mentioned some examples where services from both SAP and hyperscaler are used to resolve customer challenges. Figure 3- SAP and Hyperscaler Strength Areas (Source: SAP)

Benefits of Multi-Cloud Strategy and Multi-Cloud Solution

• Flexibility to choose cloud services from different cloud providers based on the combination of pricing, performance, security and compliance requirements, and geographical location that best suits the business.
• Ability to rapidly adopt “best-of-breed” technologies from any vendor, as needed or as they emerge, rather than limiting customers to whatever offerings or functionality a single vendor offers.
• Reduced vulnerability to outages and unplanned downtime (because an outage on one cloud won’t necessarily impact services from other clouds).
• Reduced exposure to issues with licensing, security, compatibility, and other problems that can result from “shadow IT” — users independently signing up for cloud services that an organization using just one cloud might not offer.

Sample Use Cases on SAP BTP Leveraging Hyperscalers

Cloud architects and developers now have multiple options for hyperscaler services, SAP services, and SaaS products. They must create interfaces to these, but enabling a service or application on multiple hyperscaler and other environments has a cost. There should be an upfront analysis on the implications, cost, business requirements, and future needs, as these decisions have long-lasting impact. Some quick decision points are as follows:

• Is the application region dependent? Not every application needs to run in every region.
• Is the application dependent on local jurisdiction or contractual obligation (e.g., GDPR, Russian data laws, EU access)?
• Are the required services provided by an any hyperscaler in any geographical location, etc.?

Sample Case

Below is a sample use case that showcases the use of services both from SAP BTP and hyperscaler to solve the customer problem: A customer faced the challenge of providing a 360-degree dashboard to the leadership as information has to be combined from multiple SAP and non-SAP sources such as SAP Datawarehouse, Hyperscaler data storage, and other SaaS applications such as Salesforce. This requires a lot of manual effort. Some of the sample architectures that can be created on SAP BTP are as follows: Architecture 1- When SAP S/4HANA is deployed on any hyperscaler (Azure in our current architecture) and the customer utilizes a hyperscaler for non-SAP Data. The data is combined from both sources on SAP BTP and SAP Analytics Cloud is used as the end user supporting tool. The other option can be to use Power BI as an end user reporting tool, as SAP BTP is deployed on Azure so there will not be any data egress charges. Figure 4 -Architecture-1 - Dashboard on SAP Analytics Cloud with Azure (Source: SAP) Architecture-2- When SAP S/4HANA is deployed on on-premises and customer utilizing hyperscaler for non-SAP Data. The combined data can then be saved in SAP HANA Cloud and consumed in SAP SAC as the end user reporting tool. Figure 5- Architecture-2 - Dashboard on SAP Analytics Cloud with AWS (Source: SAP)

Lessons

A few lessons learned on multi-cloud strategy or multi-cloud solutions follow:

• Cloud is not a one size fits all. Know who you are as an SAP customer.
• Know where you produce most of your data to avoid egress charges!
• Don’t just consider price when looking at a hyperscaler. Free or cheap storage or services can often become the most expensive solution.
• SAP has lots of great options. Don’t lose sight of the fact that integration is really expensive work. SAP handles much of that for you in its cloud apps/platform.
• Cloud services are here to stay. Why build something when you can buy it?
• Focus on the security and GRC framework, as that is not specific to any single cloud platform or provider.
• As usage of cloud increase, the cost increases so there should be a hybrid cloud management and cloud cost management solution which provides centralized visibility across all the clouds.
• SAP BTP does not provide all the services with all the hyperscaler, so please do an initial analysis.

Conclusion

Cloud usage is now a given. We should stop asking whether you should use the cloud and instead become Cloud Smart by focusing on multi-cloud strategy or multi-cloud solutions. The multi-cloud strategy should be chosen based on the business requirements and not by error, whereas multi-cloud solutions should always be preferred, as they offer benefits like portability. By cherry picking and adopting the best-of-breed solutions, enterprises can achieve tangible results. However, while architecting such multi-cloud systems with Rise with SAP, enterprises must carefully choose their data centers for SAP BTP as well as for hyperscalers, as having them in the same region can help reduce latency.