SAP S/4HANA Deployment Options. Let us guide you

IT decision makers of Enterprises are striving to be disruptors in 2021 and, hence, looking for the robust ERP solutions, embedded with Intelligent tools which are flexible to deploy and scale. They are also required to drive company transformation, and this means new technologies and opportunities for the business to improve both the efficiency and productivity of the enterprises. Therefore, they are always required to ask important questions: is it better to implement on-premise solution or should you opt for a cloud? Which deployment is the best for my business?

For organizations moving to SAP S/4HANA there are two decisions that must be made: where and how they will do the deployment. It could be on-premise or private, public or hybrid cloud infrastructure. It’s very important to carefully select which option is best for your business. To help you simplify this, let’s us guide you about the deployment options. There are currently many options available in the market and each has its own benefit. SAP S/4HANA is available with two deployment options, cloud and on premise. SAP offers the cloud version while the on premise version is available for either the customer to host in its data centre or on a partner cloud.

According to SAP Insider research, planned deployment models for SAP S/4HANA differs as below:

SAP on-premise. How does work?

SAP on premise represents the usage model in which each company maintains its physical equipment and hardware, generally placed in an exclusive space, to function as a data center and deal with all the information and data traffic of the application. In this case compared to owning a house. You have full control of your house, you can repaint with different colors and change the furniture as you like with as much customizations as you want. updates.

And with SAP S/4HANA on premise case you will be responsible for maintaining it for any upgrades with in house IT team. With this model, a large investment is necessary to be able to have a solid team that can satisfy the demand of each organization with technology changes. But, in addition to the main servers, it is necessary to pay for all the equipment for connection to the servers. You implement the SAP S/4HANA and manage it whatever way you want to meet your specific needs. It means that you need to take care of maintenance and keep up to date as well as any upgrades.

Cloud strategy for SAP S/4HANA deployment

SAP in the Cloud. How does work?

Unlike the on-premises model, SAP in the cloud has a completely different operation. With it, the system migrates to the data center of the cloud service provider. In this way, each company has access to all the data through the Internet, without worrying about having a high volume of expenses in the purchase of its own equipment. It’s like living in a hotel, added advantage here is that you don’t have to worry about maintenance. Everything is taken care by hotel, however, you have limitations with customization. You can not repaint, or change the furniture in the hotel.

How to choose the best: SAP in the cloud or SAP on premise?

To facilitate the work of choosing the model that you will use in your company, it is important to take into account all these characteristics that we have seen so far. But, in addition, it is important to compare the operation of each one with respect to the following topics:

Management

These two different models also require a completely different approach on the management side. In the cloud, the focus is on the end goal of making the full migration without a hitch. Therefore, the role of the company hired to do the work should be much more as an agent of change.

So when choosing an implementation partner, you need to be very clear that you understand the challenges that may come your way and that you can offer the resources to overcome them.

Investment volume

Do you prefer to see an IT solution as an internal asset, which received a high investment for its structuring, or do you prefer a stable monthly cost?

In practice, you want to have your own solution to hire a team to do the management and control or have specialists available 24 hours a day, whenever you need them, or even when you don't need them. Perhaps a stable monthly cost, such as implementing SAP in the cloud, is the most suitable for your company, as it provides access to full support from a reliable provider, which will ensure that the system is always up to date.

Easy to use

Simplicity can help your business with the advantage of always being ahead of your competitors and the ability to quickly adapt when needed.

In other words, keeping your main solution as simple as possible is by choosing the model that will allow you to have more facilities. Aspects such as support and security can become big headaches if you don't have an easy-to-fit model.

Upgrades

Best practice for your ERP is to follow a regular update schedule for all major components of your SAP system. Allowing these updates to be ignored puts your business at risk of crashing errors in the system, the database, and the executable layers of SAP as well.

This could result in higher levels of system downtime. In some cases, the lack of an update schedule can lead to security vulnerabilities.

For all this, the SAP model in the cloud helps to perform updates automatically, without directly worrying about the IT area. For its part, in the on-premise model, it is necessary to pay great attention not to lose any new updates and to recommend the installation by those responsible for the technical area.

In the next session we are going to talk about ”Agility and resilience with hyperscalers, process mining and RPAs”

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