Cloud services by third-party providers have revolutionized the IT infrastructure. With cloud trends on the rise and various cloud options available, it is just a matter of time for business operations to evolve. According to Gartner, worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services is forecast to grow 18.4% in 2021, to a total of $304.9 billion. But for many organizations, finding a preferable pathway to migrate their SAP workloads to the cloud can be challenging.

In fact, the very concept of digital transformation can be daunting – yet it’s a critical task. With the onset of digital disruption and the global pandemic, it is imperative for organizations across sectors to embrace innovative technologies to accelerate their growth and innovation while improving their agility and cost efficiency.

Organizations on SAP now have maintenance of SAP Business Suite 7 until 2027, giving them time to choose a strategy for SAP S/4HANA cloud transformation. With a diversified Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) landscape, this transformation can become a complex undertaking. However, this extended maintenance window is an opportunity for all organizations to move their existing SAP workloads to the cloud. Moving to the cloud with SAP ecosystems and robust product integrations will inevitably transform the way forward for many businesses.

Delivering outcomes with SAP on Microsoft Azure

Microsoft Azure is a popular cloud computing platform designed to enhance business scalability, flexibility, and reliability. The product includes infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and software as a service (SaaS) that provides analytics, storage, centralized management, and robust global reach.  

Microsoft Azure has unparalleled potential for incremental business performance. With its global footprint and high availability, it helps drive innovation and business intelligence to the forefront.  Integrating SAP on Microsoft Azure’s platform can optimize cost, achieve greater agility, scale with cutting-edge technology, accelerate innovation, and improve decision-making with data. By leveraging Wipro’s unique partnership with Microsoft, enterprises are also entitled to several other exclusive benefits and incentives that further reduce the overall migration cost.

Advantages of Microsoft Azure for SAP customers

The number of global companies are seeking to optimize cost and enhance agility while ensuring security and compliance through the cloud grows by the day. By mutually leveraging their technologies, Microsoft and SAP have created an opportunity for multi-national organizations to achieve a seamless integration on cloud. In addition, the organizations also gain the advantages of agility, lower cost, and risk reduction.

Employees can gain proficiency in both SAP and Azure, so the need for training is greatly reduced. With Azure in their cloud transition, companies can look forward to several benefits:

• Speed and agility
  Migration of an SAP system to a cloud environment needs to be smooth and quick, with minimal downtime or disruption. MS Azure can help speed up SAP operations and, in the process, re-structure to enhance the IT environment.
• Customer insights
  Migrating SAP systems to Azure provides a competitive edge as critical customer data is on hand. Azure features tools that help understand customer requirements accurately. Further, new-age technologies such as business intelligence (BI) and machine learning drive innovation to help companies stay ahead. For instance, companies do not need to wait for reports to get updates; SAP and Microsoft BI tools can provide a real-time dashboard view of operations.
• Robust security
  As organizational data and information grows multifold, especially in global enterprises, data security has become increasingly challenging. Microsoft is well known for adherence to stringent privacy policies and compliance processes, and Azure features a range of configuration options to ensure multi-layered protection of business-critical data.

When an organization upgrades to an innovative cloud service, it automatically obtains the comprehensive benefits from both Microsoft and SAP. Companies that opt for the collaborative initiative of Microsoft Azure and SAP profit from combined expertise and unified customer support. However, a successful migration depends on choosing a technology partner with expertise and experience in both SAP and Azure cloud solutions.

Endorsing the digital transformation journey with “Advanced Specialization”

Wipro is the partner of choice for SAP on Microsoft Azure transformations, having been recognized for its “Advanced Specialization” in 2020. Wipro’s expertise in deploying SAP solutions on Azure is well validated. The flexibility of Azure, coupled with Wipro’s “Safe Passage to Cloud” framework, can drive the transition. This proprietary migration framework incorporates SAP best practices, cookbooks, tools, levers, and accelerators to deliver an on-time, on budget, non-disruptive, and risk-free migration. Wipro’s Migration Manager (MigMan) tool augments the Safe Passage framework to help plan and execute migration projects with accuracy and quality.

Wipro offers auto-provisioning for new SAP systems in minutes. The flexibility of multi-platform support and auto scaling can enable on-demand horizontal scaling for SAP applications. This enables organizations to achieve a truly scalable and flexible future-ready platform.

Sreedhara Padmanabhuni
Senior Practice Manager

Sreedhara Padmanabhuni is part of the SAP Digital Innovation Group and leads the SAP platform transformation team at Wipro. He has over 23 years of SAP experience working in various areas like implementations, upgrades, migrations, HANA & cloud transformations. He can be reached out at sreedhara.padmanabhuni@wipro.com