SAP on Azure: What's next for migrations to Microsoft's cloud

Microsoft has continued to deepen its support for SAP workloads in 2022 to attract a broad base of organizations that may consider migrating or rehosting to the public cloud.

Microsoft announced that it was a Platinum sponsor of the recent SAP Sapphire 2022 conference, and iIn connection with the event, it touted Sentinel, Monitor, Blob Storage Connector, Private Link, and other services tailored for SAP. Microsoft also recently became an early adopter of RISE with SAP  to help support large ERP deployments to the public cloud with SAP’s operations model. And major customers like the NBA have announced they will migrate their SAP workloads to Azure with RISE.

Partners see RISE on Azure—and SAP migrations to Azure more broadly—as a big business opportunity, that supports customer strategies around integration, analytics and reporting, and process. To learn more, MSCloudNews reached out to experts in the Azure community about the current state of SAP migrations, the size of the opportunity for Microsoft and system integrators, and what may be next for the SAP-Microsoft relationship.

The choice to migrate

Why do organizations choose to migrate their SAP workloads to Azure? For many, it comes down to cost. Don Loden, Managing Director at Protiviti, explained that his company supports “lift and shift” migrations for some clients, taking them from on-prem to cloud with the goal of cutting costs.

Some clients start from a pure cost perspective, which may not always be the right approach, while others focus on building capabilities they don’t have in their on-prem environments that they can take to the cloud. Technical debt elimination is another motivation. We see many clients are trying to eliminate things that have grown over time and coalesce them into technology programs. The pain points that start the process are usually fear or adversity towards what the organization is willing to put in the cloud. While this is less-so these days, some organizations are still scared of it.

Protiviti is also beginning to see increased interest in reporting and analytics that bring together SAP data with non-SAP data sources to get business insights. Projects often include significant use of machine learning and AI, which Loden noted is often more feasible with Azure services than on-prem.