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This article helps you understand why SAP cloud adoption matters, what motivates organizations to move SAP workloads to the cloud, and how to measure progress throughout your migration.
Reasons to move an SAP platform to the cloud
SAP is an influential platform, and organizations have several motivations to adopt SAP in the cloud. When an organization considers a cloud strategy for SAP, the following motivations tend to shape cloud adoption plans:
Critical business events: Customers often adopt SAP in the cloud to mitigate contractual, regulatory, compliance, or sovereignty risks.
Migration motivations: If other assets depend on SAP to migrate successfully, then customers tend to focus on reducing costs, complexities, or operational overhead.
Innovation motivations: The cloud unlocks new opportunities for SAP to expand and deliver transformative products and services.
Infrastructure scale flexibility requirements: The cloud offers the ability to seamlessly scale up and down with infrastructure as part of business transformation with SAP S/4HANA.
SAP customers are often motivated by all four categories above. To successfully implement an SAP platform in the cloud, it's imperative for a cloud strategy team (including business and IT leaders) to review and prioritize the motivations listed in Cloud motivations. This input will help the cloud adoption team to make informed decisions throughout the implementation process.
Motivations to adopt an SAP platform in the cloud are often based on an organization's strategic objectives. The following topics are for your organization if your team is reviewing this adoption scenario:
Cycles to refresh SAP infrastructure require significant capital expenditures. If your SAP infrastructure is due for a refresh, the benefits of cloud adoption can unlock timely strategies to reduce costs.
SAP hosting contracts lock in vendors across multiple years. If your hosting, managed service, or maintenance contracts are coming up for renewal, some cloud adoption opportunities and benefits are to improve agility, unlock new innovations, and streamline operations for your most mission-critical platform.
Refresh and contract renewals can be triggered by SAP upgrade cycles or a business driver to expand into HANA, SAP Business Suite, or other SAP features. If your organization is seeking to expand SAP capabilities, cloud adoption will provide opportunities to reduce costs, innovate, optimize, and be more agile.
How to measure progress during an SAP adoption
Once you understand the top motivations for this scenario, the cloud strategy team can define measurable outcomes to further guide adoption activities. Given the impact of an SAP platform, you need to define a number of defined objectives and measurable key results. Commonly known as OKRs, objectives and key results can help you to break down SAP adoption into manageable efforts.