What is the path towards becoming an intelligent enterprise? Is it optimal digital maturity, data security, ease of accessibility, and high-end performance with flexible pricing and usage options? The answer is a mix of all the above criticalities, and migration to SAP S/4HANA cloud offers all of them in a unified ERP suite.
Cloud adoption has been seeing a steady spike during the pandemic and its aftermath. SAP S/4HANA can be deployed across leading Hyperscalars such as Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, and Azure, apart from its cloud storage model, or in an SAP S/4HANA private cloud edition. Very few businesses today can dispute the importance, urgency, and need to move to the cloud. The shift to a public cloud model has seen a global surge, with a projected growth of 21.7% to reach $587.3 billion in 20231.
At the same time, there is significant apprehension over the imminent challenges in making the transition. Organizations fear it could be a disruptive transition leading to downtimes and loss of business continuity. Some need help navigating the migration strategy and the ensuing process, and others with legacy systems may not be ready to deal with the change independently.
The Solution
A well-thought-out strategy, a clear roadmap, and a partnership with an experienced team of experts will ensure a migration with minimal disruption. The benefits of migrating to the SAP S/4HANA cloud are manifold, and the transition will be worth it. You can also consider the RISE with SAP offering, designed for enterprises making their foray into the SAP ERP landscape or moving to the cloud.
Organizations that implement a cloud migration with the SAP S/4HANA platform gain from savings in infrastructure, hardware, and maintenance costs. The adoption also gives a competitive edge, such as better performance, security, and improved ROI.
SAP S/4HANA Cloud Features
Migrating to a cloud-based environment involves transitioning data, applications, and technology from a local deployment to a remote cloud platform or a hybrid one, including both deployment models. Such migration has distinct advantages in performance, scalability, security, and ease of development, achieving greater productivity and efficiency.
Accelerated Digital Transformation: Cloud adoption enables and supports digitization. The integration of the latest technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), and Machine Learning (ML), is now native to cloud services and is tuned to be easily leveraged. Migrating to the cloud is the first step in preparing your enterprise for the future and transforming it into an intelligent enterprise.
Insightful Analytics: The anytime-anywhere access to data is a powerful feature that businesses gain from moving to the SAP S/4HANA cloud, ensuring a winning combination of easy availability of real-time data with powerful analytics. In addition, predictive analytics equip you better to charter and implement a future change or enhancement. Such essential features are a potent addition to organizations' arsenal of business intelligence insights. Simplified and comprehensive analytics give the competitive edge by enabling efficient data-driven decisions.
Flexible Resources: Dynamic business requirements create challenges in optimally managing workloads. Easy scalability in real time eliminates the need to invest in a CapEx model and shift to an OpEx form of operational costs. Agility and flexibility in managing workloads ensure optimal performance levels, and cost management becomes simpler.
The SAP S/4HANA cloud offers tools that help businesses manage and maintain the systems themselves or with minimal IT support teams. You stand to gain from the advantage of assigning your in-house resources to focus on business and strategic initiatives. However, complex deployments, dedicated maintenance resources, and feature enhancements require a third-party Application Managed Service provider, and that's where New Era Technology comes in place.
Workflow Enhancements: Process streamlining and performance optimization are a direct outcome of an SAP cloud migration exercise. The SAP HANA in-memory database minimizes the data footprint and leads to faster data access and analytics in sync with your operational processes. These features are absent in conventional on-prem deployment models, denying you the essentialities of a modern ERP platform.
Security and Resilience: Built-in access controls, extensive data encryption, and continuous support ensure that your SAP S/4HANA cloud implementation is up to date with the latest security practices, securing your data and connectivity. The included disaster recovery systems and replicated data storage make the systems more resilient when compared to on-prem implementations. The focus is securing data and connectivity to ensure seamless business operations and continuity.
Cost Savings: One of the most important considerations of any business decision is the impact on finances. The TCO in SAP S/4HANA cloud migration decreases due to multiple factors, such as scalable subscription models, savings from reduced infrastructure costs, the need for less support and maintenance staff, and data storage optimization.
The flexible pay-per-use model can be scaled up or down per your technology requirements, benefiting from a flexible SAP S/4HANA cloud deployment.
The reduced dependence on large IT teams, infrastructure costs, and the flexibility of provisioning, in addition to improved performance, create a harmonized model for significant cost savings. Cloud-enabled provisioning facilitates deployment across even geographically scattered locations in record times. Such flexibility suits enterprises which have a diverse global presence.
Integration Capabilities: SAP S/4HANA includes constituent modules such as Finance, Supply Chain Management, Human Capital Management, Production, Sales and Distribution, and many more. The unified SAP S/4HANA suite provides a platform for diverse business functions, with easy integration with other SAP modules and third-party applications.
Over and beyond all these reasons, business owners using SAP must also remember the recent announcements to end support for SAP's Business Suite 7 software suite by 2027. The migration to the SAP S/4 HANA cloud is now inevitable. In such a scenario, it makes sense to transition to the cloud as early as possible. Delays can only cause costs to rise further and can disrupt business continuity.
With the above overarching reasons to transition to the cloud, rapid provisioning, and enhanced agility, making a move is now a business imperative. If cloud adoption is your priority now, or if you want to explore options, contact us, and our team of experts will be glad to help.
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