SAP INSIDER SPECIAL REPORT | ELEVATE YOUR BUSINESS IN THE CLOUD Flexibility in the Cloud Access Key SAP Data at Nearly Limitless Capacity Jason Zander A s more and more companies move enterprise operations to the cloud, they are confronted with countless choices. In some cases, they only want A New Cloud Deployment Option for SAP Solutions With Azure, Microsoft has developed a reliable, secure to run certain point solutions in the cloud; in others, solution that offers a unified operating system and vir- they push their entire suite of applications into the tualization technology that drives private, public, and cloud. Then there is the host of options available to hybrid clouds. customize the cloud experience to an organization’s Azure offers hybrid cloud and virtual machine por- needs, whether in terms of user experience, security, tability with virtual hard disk virtual machines that or functionality. can be moved back and forth between Azure and on- One constant that we hear is that customers want premise servers, affording the ability to run SAP appli- a trusted partner with a proven cloud approach. For cation development and testing on Azure while produc- more than 20 years, Microsoft and SAP have partnered tion runs on premise (see Figure 1 on the next page). to extend the range of offerings available to our joint Azure offers access to scale, enabling companies to customers.1 In 2014, this partnership expanded with the reach their customers around the globe, and is avail- announcement of the SAP certification of Microsoft able in 19 regions. Azure, Microsoft’s hyper-scale, enterprise-grade cloud Additionally, Azure provides reliable and durable platform, for several key SAP business applications. storage for data disks right out of the box — eliminat- Since this announcement, that certification has grown ing time-consuming steps to manually achieve geo- to include SAP Business Suite, SAP Business All-in-One, redundancy. For more than 37,000 customers running SAP NetWeaver Application Server for ABAP, and SAP SAP systems on SQL Server, Azure uses common engi- HANA, developer edition. neering criteria that enable SQL Server disaster recov- With the announcement, customers are able to enjoy ery and backup to the platform to work seamlessly after the benefits of SAP software on Microsoft’s enterprise- installation. Microsoft has established deep enterprise grade public cloud. As a result, joint enterprise custom- account and support relationships to serve customers ers are able to move existing applications and services around the world affordably. or deploy new applications to Microsoft Azure using the SAP Cloud Appliance Library tool to benefit from nearly unlimited computing capacity. See http://news.microsoft.com/2014/05/19/microsoft-and-sapannounce-new-cloud-data-and-mobile-experiences. 1 A Cost-Effective Solution for Enhanced Efficiency By moving qualified SAP workloads to Azure, customers can reduce costs by 40%-75% and eliminate “With Microsoft Azure, we just add capacity when we need it. Such flexibility and easy scalability are great for us, especially because we have a very short window of time for upgrading our SAP systems.” — Gavin Martin, Application Development Manager, Kordia Reproduced from the Apr n May n Jun 2015 issue of SAPinsider with permission from its publisher, WIS Publishing | SAPinsiderOnline.com CVP, Microsoft Azure Cloud Engineering Microsoft ELEVATE YOUR BUSINESS IN THE CLOUD | SAP INSIDER SPECIAL REPORT FIGURE 1 Enterprise IT environments today require solutions that can be delivered faster, more cost effectively, and with greater flexibility at global scale; with Azure, you can use the cloud alongside your existing infrastructure and apps, leveraging common tools, technologies, and skills the need to refresh hardware for those workloads. factor of over 200. With Azure, customers can instantly Furthermore, moving SAP developmental and test provision any amount of storage or computing qualified production applications, archival data, capacity to meet growing or shrinking application and training systems to Azure can help free up on- needs, eliminating the challenges of capacity planning premise data center capacity and allow business and scaling quickly to meet demand. users to instantly self-provision development and test system capacity on Azure, reducing cycle times by a Learn More With Azure, joint customers benefit from a reliable and secure cloud infrastructure platform that enables them “Microsoft Azure possesses the power and flexibility to accommodate our needs for SAP performance. We are confident that our SAP landscapes will run efficiently to quickly deploy SAP solutions in the cloud. Customers have realized simplified infrastructure management, improved time to market, lower costs, and the opportunity to have the best of both worlds by integrating on-premise assets with Azure. on the Azure platform, perform appropriately, and With the support of license mobility for SAP soft- continue to deliver value to our business.” ware on Microsoft Azure, Microsoft provides a fully — Andrew Goodin, Global Manager Information Systems, ronment in which to deploy SAP workloads. For addi- Zespri International supported and properly licensed public cloud envitional information, visit http://azure.microsoft.com or http://microsoft.com/sap, or contact your Microsoft account specialist. Reproduced from the Apr n May n Jun 2015 issue of SAPinsider with permission from its publisher, WIS Publishing | SAPinsiderOnline.com
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