As organizations continue to invest in digital transformation and other areas that help them be more competitive, moving to the cloud is a great first step. However, true innovation comes in the form of application modernization where game-changing technologies like AI and blockchain are deployed.

With core applications like SAP that hold enormous importance to an organization, the time to embrace migration and modernization is now. By using SAP business applications in the cloud, IT teams can simplify workflows, speed processes and reduce business risk, thus freeing up time and resources to focus on their move to SAP S/4HANA. Cloud enables enterprises to:

• Optimize IT investments
• Maximize the value of data
• Get to market faster
• Use IT more strategically
• Exploit technical innovations

But not all cloud solutions or providers can deliver the capabilities, deep experience and characteristics demanded by modern enterprises. These benefits include proven performance and reliability, high availability, and global service capabilities. Fundamentally, you want a cloud partner you can trust to understand and help propel your business forward.

In changing or volatile business environments and global conditions, the importance of digitization, business continuity planning and disaster recovery preparedness have emerged as key themes. Organizations today are moving to cloud to better execute on these strategies. This move is because the legacy model of building a separate data center for disaster recovery is increasingly less attractive in the cloud era. With a hybrid cloud model for disaster recovery and business continuity of SAP environments, enterprises can achieve key business goals, such as reducing total cost of ownership (TCO), embracing best practices and reducing risk.

When it comes to disaster recovery and business continuity for SAP applications, there’s no room for compromise. It’s critical to work with a public cloud provider that understands the availability demands of enterprise environments and delivers an architecture that mitigates downtime risk to near zero, while rapidly accelerating recovery.

Benefits of IBM Cloud

Moving your SAP workloads to IBM Cloud® can improve your company’s agility and accelerate time to market. This method helps increase competitiveness and preparedness, allowing you to better serve your lines of business.

IBM has decades of experience in addressing the unique needs of enterprise customers. This experience has helped to shape our offerings for SAP. IBM Cloud offers a wide array of SAP options that include high levels of enterprise performance, resiliency, security and cost-efficiency.

Enterprises have a significant amount of time and money invested in existing infrastructure, people and processes for their SAP environments. One of the biggest concerns with migrating business-critical workloads to the cloud is the idea of losing current investments. While a valid concern, these investments can be maintained — specifically if you are using VMware as a primary virtualization platform.

Lift and shift SAP on VMware environments to IBM Cloud with minimal disruption, risk and change, using solutions within the IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions portfolio. Choose from a range of VMware options based on your preferred configurations, levels of automation and other factors. This portfolio of options provides huge advantages versus manual approaches, which may have limited flexibility in hardware selection and software configuration or may lack formal backing from VMware in terms of support and certifications due to the age of hardware and software.

By moving VMware-based SAP workloads to IBM Cloud, you can take advantage of a known environment, while enabling access to new cloud technologies and innovations, including IBM Watson® technology for AI and platforms for cloud-native apps to extend the capabilities of your SAP business applications.

Benefits of IBM Cloud

IDC Research identified five key benefits (PDF, 418 KB) for enterprise customers using this model.

With SAP being a critical component to your business, you need a provider that offers cost-effective solutions to running your SAP environments as they are today and providing a wider platform to expand digital transformation around SAP S/4HANA. IBM Cloud provides the latest cloud-native technologies through our open-source collaborations, offering the security and performance you need for the core SAP business applications and the technologies to create cloud-native SAP extensions.

Frost & Sullivan (PDF, 4.5 MB) cite five main reasons why IT teams need to urgently consider modernizing SAP in the cloud.

Benefits of IBM Cloud

As SAP discontinues support for SAP Business Suite in 2027, there’s even more urgency to develop and execute on a strategic migration plan towards SAP S/4HANA. IBM Cloud is uniquely positioned to support your SAP migration efforts with the help of industry-leading SAP certified business partners. These experts have extensive professional service options for SAP workload assessment, migration planning and migration to the cloud.

IBM has been an SAP Global Platinum partner for 48 years and is one of the most rewarded partners, with 36 SAP Pinnacle Awards. If you are planning a migration to cloud or SAP S/4HANA, IBM has a full-service portfolio available with IBM Services to take you from planning to post-migration optimization, leveraging standardized methodologies built on thousands of successful migrations.

Get the infrastructure you need to build new applications from scratch, modernize existing applications, or both. Integration tools, such as messaging, gateways and API management, bring together new applications with existing ones and workloads. For example, the IBM Cloud Pak® offering is an enterprise-ready, containerized software solution that gives clients a faster, more reliable way to move to the cloud. It’s modular, designed to be easy to consume and runs on virtually any cloud. The IBM Cloud Pak for Applications solution helps you develop new, cloud-native applications and unlocks additional value from existing applications. Additionally, the Red Hat® OpenShift® on IBM Cloud solution delivers an enterprise Kubernetes environment for deploying and managing container-based workloads like SAP Data Hub.

Increase SAP memory performance with Intel Optane persistent memory for insightful decisions.

The cloud offers benefits that are quickly realized after workloads are migrated — and it sets you up for modernization of SAP workloads. IBM Cloud offers a flexible path for your cloud migration and modernization journey, meeting you where you are now and where you aspire to be in the future. With over 37,000 SAP consultants, we offer an ecosystem of expertise and partners that will work with you to develop your migration and modernization plan and support you along the way.

Enterprise-grade cloud

Several distinct advantages are available for your business-critical SAP workloads, including:

• An AI-enabled cloud platform gives you the ability to access real-time information across your entire enterprise and delivers insight to where it can provide immediate value.
• A lift and shift approach for SAP workloads to the cloud uses familiar VMware technology and skills, enabling enterprises to non-disruptively take advantage of the benefits of public cloud with minimal change and risk.
• The significant improvements in disaster recovery and business continuity don’t have to go through the up-front and ongoing expense of building a separate off-site data center for disaster recovery.
• The ability to drive SAP performance, control and security is accomplished by using dedicated bare metal servers based on Intel Xeon Scalable Processors — and now supporting Intel Optane persistent memory. These servers are certified to run SAP HANA and NetWeaver applications — and host all your SAP business applications.

IBM Cloud offers the lowest cloud vendor costs (PDF, 94 KB) and one of the broadest portfolios of SAP-certified cloud infrastructure choices with a wide array of enterprise-grade security services and products to help those in regulated industries.

We provide SAP customers a flexible cloud platform that can adapt to your specific business needs. This includes the flexibility to adopt hybrid cloud models, high security with zero public networking and edge network services with IBM Cloud® Internet Services.

SAP on the IBM Cloud® with Intel technologies

IBM, Intel and SAP bring you faster access to more data in the cloud with SAP HANA instances optimized on Intel Xeon Scalable processors and Intel Optane persistent memory technology. Businesses are migrating to the cloud, enabling operational automation, on-demand elasticity, security and compliance capabilities. SAP on IBM with Intel technologies gives you:

• Future-proof cloud investments running on pre-validated, certified instances optimized for SAP HANA
• Greater business value by enabling near real-time analysis and a single source of truth
• Better ROI with a simplified, more efficient SAP HANA landscape standardized across cloud, on-premises and hybrid. Get real-time insights at blazing speeds and a larger database at lower cost.

IBM Cloud provides flexible options to customize your plan and fit your enterprise needs. This includes: IBM Cloud® Bare Metal Servers, dedicated host virtual servers, multi-tenant virtual servers, and single-tenant software defined data center (SDDC).

Speed and flexibility

Our cloud solutions let you rapidly deploy and scale SAP-certified bare metal servers in the IBM Cloud. Provision these servers on demand with your choice of our growing SAP offerings, ranging from small to large configurations. Then, spin up your SAP environment and scale out as demand requires — faster and more easily than with private infrastructure.

Our unique network architecture, global network of data centers and network points of presence (PoPs) give you the flexibility to put your SAP workloads where they work best for you. They allow you to move data to, from and between your servers with minimal latency at no cost on our private network.

Control and security

When building your SAP-certified bare metal servers, mirror your on-premises environments by mixing physical servers and virtual servers with VMware, the virtualization engine of choice for SAP deployments. Manage your SAP landscapes in the cloud through our customer portal or interact via an API. You have full control of the stack.

We offer FIPS 140-2 Level 4 encryption, the highest-level of key-management encryption and keep your own key (KYOK), so only you can access your data. Not even IBM will be able to access your data. We’re committed to using the most advanced hardware technologies that dramatically minimize your data center and server exposure to outside threats. With visibility into and control of your cloud environment, you can apply your required security best practices for peace of mind.

Path to AI and IoT

Successful deployment and effective use of AI require that it be an integral part of cloud architecture and not an afterthought. IBM is an undisputed leader in AI and cognitive technologies. By combining IoT data with cognitive computing, you can extract valuable insights to improve virtually every aspect of your operations and enable innovative, new business models.

There’s a broad range of compute choices: from bare metal and virtual servers, to serverless architectures and Cloud Foundry apps, to Kubernetes containers. These capabilities support applications of essentially any design and IBM Watson technology for AI. With the IBM Watson IoT® platform, customers can connect devices, gateways and networks, and manage, secure and analyze the associated data.