SAP S/4HANA is the world’s leading intelligent ERP worldwide, enabling companies to deliver the ultimate customer experience. The intelligent ERP allows companies to adapt and scale with the agility needed to stay at the forefront of ever-shifting markets.
SAP S/4HANA offers diverse deployment and hosting options to meet different companies and organizations’ different needs and requirements.
The intelligent ERP system has two offerings:
- SAP S/4HANA on-premise, which includes:
- hosting the ERP on a public cloud (hyperscaler like AWS, GCP and Microsoft Azure)
- hosting it on the company’s premises
- SAP S/4HANA Cloud, which includes:
- S/4HANA Cloud (Public Cloud)
- S/4HANA Cloud (Private Edition)
The latter option is considered the core of RISE with SAP solution, and we will cover in this blog the details for both options.
What set SAP S/4HANA Cloud apart from other ERP cloud offerings is that the SaaS offers companies:
- Localization
- Innovation
- Operational Excellence
- Improved User Experience
What is Public Cloud?
Public Clouds are a low-cost, efficient SaaS solution where all clients share the same cloud. Every company uploads its data, and applications and selects certain services according to its needs. Public cloud providers offer numerous data centres that are partitioned and shared by clients.
Hyperscale cloud providers like Amazon, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure manage public clouds. These are considered the most cost-effective option for deploying and managing different software and solutions. The public cloud offers an infrastructure with products and solutions that helps deliver agility, performance and innovation to businesses.
Many public cloud providers have invested heavily in SAP in the last few years, and the public cloud is a great option to host many SAP applications. It offers unparalleled agility and virtually supports scaling.
Advantages of Public Cloud
Lower Costs
Public clouds don’t require capital investments or purchasing hardware or software, and companies only pay for the service they use. Most importantly companies remove the financial burden on maintenance and update costs. All the updates are performed by cloud providers and included in the package companies purchase. Moreover, the pay-as-you-use pricing model eliminates wasted spending.
Optimizing IT Department Budget
The staffing budget can make up for more than half of the total computing costs. The public cloud offers companies the ability to restructure their IT teams and use the skilful resources in the areas that make more money for the business.
Ease of use
Companies can migrate and host their SAP workloads on public cloud hosting easily and quickly with the right partner like Altivate. It can be configured remotely through various hyperscalers like AWS.
Increased Uptime
Public cloud providers guarantee uptime with minimal risk of failure. The cloud system usually includes several servers to ensure a smooth performance for business applications. SAP S/4HANA public cloud can be implemented through greenfield only.
Why SAP S/HANA Public Cloud?
SAP S/HANA cloud is highly standardized and offers a vast scope LOB and industry processes, enabling partner add-ons. It is a complete modern SaaS ERP solution. It also offers the highest degree of automation via machine learning and robotic process automation.
Moreover, it offers one of the lowest operational TCO with no infrastructure investment or costs, reducing the IT administrative tasks. It is easily implemented and offers speedy go-live with accelerated adoption and deployment. Most importantly, it offers complete data security and protection.
Customizations are possible through SAP Fiori apps to facilitate changes like custom fields and business objects. However, clients can’t access the backend GUI or modify SAP source code.
To sum up, the S/4HANA public cloud is efficient and affordable and often runs service in a shared environment. For the RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud, it is offered as a public cloud solution.
What is a Private Cloud?
Firstly to clarify, a private cloud incorporates infrastructure including the hardware, network, software and storage with cloud architecture hosted on an on-premises. Secondly, the private cloud usually includes most of the benefits of the public cloud with more customization. In a private cloud, companies can host their data and SAP workload on cloud services that are not shared with other companies. These private clouds are dedicated solely to your company.
Due to the advantages of the private cloud, many businesses prefer to construct their screened clouds, like agility and on-demand scaling. It also includes the features and benefits of the public cloud like virtualisation capabilities and computing resources.
Advantages of Private Cloud
Total control and improved efficiency
Private clouds are usually hosted on-site or in a private third-party data centre. Consequently, businesses get more control over their data and infrastructure, facilitating quick updates when needed. The in-house IT team is usually in charge of application deployment. They can also leverage advanced analytics to predict and prevent bottlenecks and downtime.
Customization
One of the most significant benefits of private clouds is customization. Private clouds offer a high level of customization to meet the organization’s specific technical and business requirements.
Most importantly, businesses can select their infrastructure with particular storage and networking features in a private cloud.
Clients can customize almost anything and modify the SAP source code with complete visibility and control of the backend through the SAP GUI. Additionally, they also have full access to the on-premise extensibility framework and code enhancement and modifications.
Security
Another crucial advantage of private clouds is the high level of security compared to the public cloud. Data is protected and managed on private servers where only the company has access, enhancing data privacy. Moreover, if the cloud servers are hosted on-site, they are managed by the internal IT team.
Likewise, if datacenters host the cloud servers, the IT team will also access the data through highly secure networks.
Compliance
Customer information is highly sensitive data for any business, and any breach could negatively impact the business. Private clouds enable businesses to have great control over their data, in addition to ensuring data privacy.
For instance, accessing security logs from a public cloud may be rather challenging if a data breach happens. However, it is very easy for businesses with a private cloud.
Leveraging Resources
Most importantly, the private cloud guarantees to leverage any underused server or technology. In addition, virtualization offers private cloud users improved resource utilization. That is to say, deploying workloads to a different server as demands alter from services.
In the case of SAP and RISE, hosting SAP S/4HANA on a private cloud ensures not only the responsiveness of the business but also a total 20% reduction in TCO, 87% reduction in staffing and infrastructure cost and fast deployment.
Moreover, a private cloud facilitates business migration from the outdated SAP ERP ECC system into the SAP S/4HANA Cloud.
There are also different options for hosting SAP workload and solutions like on-premises which is still considered a good option for some businesses, however, it restricts certain functionalities. Moreover, there are also hybrid clouds which combine the best of both worlds.
If you are interested in exploring hosting options and different hyperscalers providers, Altivate can help you as an AWS, GCP, and Microsoft Azure partner.
Why SAP S/4HANA Private Cloud?
SAP S/4HANA Private Cloud edition allows companies to focus on growing their core business instead of focusing on their IT systems by simplifying IT landscapes. It offers a single point of contact and one SLA that covers accountability for ERP license, hyperscaler infrastructure, and operations. Implementation for the SAP S/4HANA Private Cloud can be done via a brown or green field approach or hybrid selective data transition.
Lower TCO
SAP S/4HANA Private cloud edition has various subscription pricing and generous cloud extension policy that can result in up to 20% lower TCO compared to on-premise deployment. Moreover, companies can achieve up to 87% reduction in infrastructure and staffing costs.
High flexibility
The all-in user-based hyperscaler infrastructure model allows quick scaling while eliminating sticky CAPEX and in-house deployment costs (typically account for 30-50% of TCO.) The private cloud edition also enables customers to retain all the investments they had in their existing ERP system by migrating it to the cloud. In conclusion, it allows companies to innovate at their pace.
Faster time to go live
Cloud-based deployment allows for much faster implementation and realization of business benefits, typically within 6 to 12 months, depending on the complexity of the data and infrastructure.
SAP S/4HANA private cloud is ideal for organizations looking for gradual transformation to a pure SaaS landscape at their own pace with a well-defined conversion methodology. It offers software, support, technical managed services, and infrastructure, from a single point of contact, with one set of SLAs.
It offers the full SAP S/4HANA functionality in 25 industries, 64 countries.
How to choose between Public and Private Cloud Edition for RISE with SAP?
Existing SAP ERP clients who want to migrate to the cloud, however, do not wish to go through a complete upgrade process and wish to retain their current investment made to their existing SAP ERP landscape. The private edition is highly recommended. The same goes for new clients looking for a comprehensive, customizable ERP system, including partner add-ons.
On the other hand, for clients, whether new or existing SAP clients looking to migrate to the cloud and welling to replace ERP solutions with a complete process redesign, SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud is more recommended. It is the right choice for companies ready to transform into intelligent enterprises with the future of ERP in a predefined process.
Altivate team has vast experience in both SAP S/4HANA and SAP S/4HANA cloud with both of its offerings and we are ready to provide you with a complete solution tailored to your needs. Talk to our team for a consultation today.
