Aug 3, 2023
•2 minute read
SAP Infrastructure
SAP infrastructure encompasses the hardware, platforms, and hosting environments on which SAP applications run. From on-premise servers and private cloud facilities to public cloud hyperscalers and hybrid configurations, the infrastructure layer defines how SAP systems perform, scale, and maintain security requirements. As organizations accelerate migrations to SAP S/4HANA and SAP Cloud ERP, infrastructure decisions around cost, data residency, operational resilience, and AI readiness have become central to every SAP transformation strategy today.
What Is SAP Infrastructure?
SAP infrastructure refers to the full range of hardware and hosting environments that support SAP applications, including SAP S/4HANA, SAP HANA, and cloud-based ERP. It spans on-premise data centers, private cloud providers, managed hosting partners, public cloud hyperscalers, and hybrid combinations of all three. Originally confined to mainframe and client-server environments, SAP infrastructure has expanded significantly to include containerized, Kubernetes-based, and sovereign cloud configurations. The right infrastructure model is ultimately defined by an organization’s workload characteristics, regulatory requirements, and long-term cost and flexibility objectives.
SAP infrastructure encompasses the hardware, platforms, and hosting environments on which SAP applications run. From on-premise servers and private cloud facilities to public cloud hyperscalers and hybrid configurations, the infrastructure layer defines how SAP systems perform, scale, and maintain security requirements. As organizations accelerate migrations to SAP S/4HANA and SAP Cloud ERP, infrastructure decisions around cost, data residency, operational resilience, and AI readiness have become central to every SAP transformation strategy today.
What Is SAP Infrastructure?
SAP infrastructure refers to the full range of hardware and hosting environments that support SAP applications, including SAP S/4HANA, SAP HANA, and cloud-based ERP. It spans on-premise data centers, private cloud providers, managed hosting partners, public cloud hyperscalers, and hybrid combinations of all three. Originally confined to mainframe and client-server environments, SAP infrastructure has expanded significantly to include containerized, Kubernetes-based, and sovereign cloud configurations. The right infrastructure model is ultimately defined by an organization’s workload characteristics, regulatory requirements, and long-term cost and flexibility objectives.
What Use Cases Are Referenced?
Florida Crystals: SAP Infrastructure Migration to AWS for Scalability and Cost Savings
Florida Crystals Corporation, a U.S. sugar company, migrated its SAP applications to AWS, using Intel Xeon processors and the SAP specialist Lemongrass. The move delivered greater scalability and processing performance, improved monitoring and backup capabilities, and reduced costs through AWS instance consolidation. SAPinsider covered the case in 2024.
SAIL: India’s Largest Steel Manufacturer Modernizes SAP Infrastructure with HPE GreenLake
Steel Authority of India Limited, which produces over 17 million tons of steel annually, deployed HPE GreenLake at its Bokaro plant for an SAP S/4HANA migration. The hybrid cloud environment accelerated backups and improved reporting while laying the foundation to consolidate all business units onto SAP S/4HANA. SAPinsider covered the case.
Dell APEX: Private Cloud Infrastructure Delivers 194% ROI for SAP Modernization
Dell’s APEX pay-per-use model delivers a three-year ROI of 194% and operational cost savings of up to 35%, per Dell’s analysis of IDC data. Organizations provision compute resources 60% faster and storage resources 67% faster than with traditional procurement, supporting SAP modernization without migrating to RISE with SAP. SAPinsider analyzed the model.
Nutanix and NetApp: Independent Compute and Storage Scaling for SAP HANA
Nutanix and NetApp integrated their platforms in April 2026, combining Nutanix Cloud Platform with NetApp ONTAP to eliminate HCI scaling bottlenecks for SAP HANA. Both are certified for SAP HANA production, enabling independent compute and storage scaling and cutting S/4HANA VM migration downtime to minutes. SAPinsider reported the launch.
SAP Achieves IT Baseline Certification for German Data Centers
SAP secured ISO/IEC 27001 certification based on Germany’s IT-Grundschutz framework for its German data centers, validated by the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI). The certification covers physical security, environmental safeguards, and operational controls, establishing a compliance baseline for sovereign SAP deployments in regulated sectors. SAPinsider reported the April 2026 certification.
What SAPinsider Research Supports This Topic?
SAP Infrastructure and Landscape Trends 2024 Benchmark Report
SAPinsider surveyed 176 community members and found the top goals of infrastructure change are minimizing operational inefficiencies, reducing costs, increasing flexibility, and improving resilience. RISE with SAP emerged as a leading infrastructure choice alongside private cloud and hosted environments, displacing new on-premises investment as a primary priority.
SAP Workloads Are Moving to the Cloud
SAPinsider found that 88% of SAP customers run at least some workloads in a private, public, or hybrid cloud environment, with most of those still running on-premises systems and planning to migrate to the cloud within two years. Security-led infrastructure deployment requirements, with 85% citing cloud-based data encryption and protection as a top priority.
ERP Migration and Transformation 2026 Benchmark Report
SAPinsider found 55% of organizations have deployed SAP S/4HANA, but only 34% have fully transitioned. SAP S/4HANA Cloud deployments now nearly equal traditional deployments, with 43% citing SAP AI announcements as the top external ERP factor, reinforcing the urgency of building an AI-ready infrastructure foundation ahead of the 2027 ECC deadline.
Video: How Do You Better Manage Systems and Improve Resilience?Organizations today need to keep their business solutions up and running, and infrastructure providers have been focused on activities that help organizations accelerate implementations and reduced both planned and unplanned downtime. However, enterprise landscapes can often be complex to both implement and maintain. This is particularly true for SAP landscapes where there are often multiple systems, multiple instances of those systems, and connectivity and integration that must remain functional.
But beyond the issues of implementation and configuration, system complexity can often cause issues to develop over time. When an update is performed, or a patch implemented, or a system configuration changed, small issues can accumulate in the system that can often remain unnoticed until they accumulate sufficiently to cause a problem. This can occur even when systems are initially configured using best practices. The challenge that organizations face is in finding and identifying these issues before they cause problems.
In this video interview with Sherry Yu, Director of SAP Success Architect at SUSE, we discuss the resilience challenges facing organizations today, how system administration concerns can add more complexity, and how these challenges can be addressed.
Apr 21, 2023
•1 minute read
How to Add Value and Mitigate Risk for an SAP ImplementationClick Here to View the Session Deck SAP implementation services give organizations the support they need to deploy SAP solutions that allow their company to grow successfully. Adding value and mitigating the risks of the implementation process will be shared in the lessons learned on SAP implementations. View this session deck to: Identify relevant areas […]
Mar 29, 2023
•1 minute read
Impact20: How AWS and SUSE Helped Customers Modernize and Build a Resilient SAP LandscapeClick Here to View the Session Deck Are you planning to migrate and modernize your SAP applications in cloud, optimize operation, and reduce risk. During this session, experts from AWS and SUSE will take a case study of an industry leading energy provider, demonstrate how early adoption of AWS cloud and hosting mission critical SAP […]
Mar 29, 2023
•1 minute read
Your Super User Plan Fell Apart After Your Project Ended?Click Here to View the Session Deck Did your Super User plan solve your end user support issues? Are your users getting accurate, timely, and relevant transaction execution support? Are end user errors essentially non-existent? Are work arounds a thing of the past? Is business engagement and ownership at an all-time high? If you answered […]
Mar 29, 2023
•1 minute read
SAP Cloud Application Security GovernanceClick Here to View the Session Deck Cloud technologies are being increasingly adopted by organizations, regardless of their size, location or industry. When implementing these new technologies, most of organizations face the following challenges: Lack of operating model and clearly defined roles and responsibilities, lack of embedded management operational controls around application security, and lack […]
Mar 28, 2023
•1 minute read
Video: Building a Platform for the FutureWhile most organizations are in the process of updating or transforming their SAP landscape over the next few years, there are a number of challenges that they must address to complete this successfully. One of the biggest of these challenges is the move to SAP S/4HANA, something nearly a quarter of the respondents to recent SAPinsider research are trying to coordinate with their infrastructure changes. But the other decisions they must make can be just as important. How can systems be moved to the cloud? What is the right cloud environment and platform to use? How can supply chain stability be ensured? How sustainable is new infrastructure? What happens to an existing landscape after it is replaced? All these are questions that must be answered by organizations planning infrastructure change.
In this video interview with Andreas Schmidt, Offering Manager for SAP Digitalization at T-Systems, we discuss the challenges facing organizations today, what they need to build platforms for the future, and why it is critical that they find the right hosting partner.
Mar 13, 2023
•1 minute read
Building a Platform for the FutureOrganizations are in the process of transitioning many of their workloads to the cloud. This is particularly true of SAP systems where there is frequently a need for new infrastructure that will provide additional flexibility and scalability while reducing cost. Cloud environments are the most likely choice for organizations as they seek to create a platform for the future, but there are important questions that must be answered as these landscape transformation and digitization projects get underway.
To better understand these challenges, SAPinsider sat down with Andreas Schmidt, Offering Manager for SAP Digitalization at T-Systems. Schmidt says that many organizations that he works with are in the process of moving to SAP S/4HANA and planning a digitalization process for which they already have a roadmap. But the challenge they face is that there is no common approach to that deployment. Every landscape is unique, and each organization has different priorities and constraints that need to be considered. Many of these organizations are looking for advice as they create their roadmaps to address these challenges.
- Deploying a platform for the future involves answering questions around sustainability, innovations, and integration with other applications.
- Finding the right partner to assist with these challenges can help ensure the success of these deployments.
Feb 9, 2023
•7 minute read
Video: Building Cloud Infrastructure in Your LandscapeIn order to run today’s SAP systems, you need infrastructure that will not just support SAP HANA, but that which will provide the foundation for future innovation. While some organizations are looking at the cloud to meet these infrastructure needs, others continue to invest in local infrastructure. But the option of a managed environment on-premise that provides both a cloud like experience and an operational expenditure cost may be a third option that you hadn’t considered.
In this video interview with Sunil Patel, Director of Worldwide Ecosystem Sales and Alliances at HPE, and Richard Jones, Senior Product Manager for HPE GreenLake for SAP, we discuss how organizations are looking at using a managed environment on-premise to provide that cloud-like experience in their own data centers.
Dec 28, 2022
•1 minute read
Building Cloud Infrastructure in Your LandscapeIn order to run today’s SAP systems, you need infrastructure that will not just support SAP HANA, but that which will provide the foundation for future innovation. While some organizations are looking at the cloud to meet these infrastructure needs, others continue to invest in local infrastructure. But the option of a managed environment on-premise that provides both a cloud like experience and an operational expenditure cost may be a third option that you hadn’t considered.
• Organizations are updating infrastructure as they update their SAP solutions.
• There is an increased need to iterate rapidly while putting in place infrastructure that reduces costs and adds flexibility and performance.
• Managed environments on-premise can provide the same benefits as a cloud environment while residing in your data center.
Dec 27, 2022
•6 minute read
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