“In 2022, the global public cloud services market is expected to grow by approximately 22 percent, which amounts to about 482 billion U.S. dollars.” – Statista Research Department
Global organizations are adjusting to the ‘new normal’ and SAP Solutions are playing a vital role in addressing immediate needs of businesses paving the path to resilience.
The roadblocks to resilience can be successfully countered with the right solution in place. Organizations that have already adopted SAP have been facing these challenges to run and protect their mission-critical on-premise business functions –- Rising Infrastructure Costs
- New Business Process Requirements
- Increasing amount of data
- Considerable Investment in Capital
- More time & energy consumed to get the most out of SAP Solutions & workloads within on premise data centers
To counter these and more, many Industry-leaders have begun tapping into the power of cloud by migrating their on premise SAP S/4HANA workloads either partially or fully to Microsoft Azure cloud.
Migrate your SAP S/4HANA on MS Azure cloud for a variety of benefits including optimized business costs and high application performance.
In this article, cloud experts at VC ERP Consulting answer the common questions asked by industry leaders before selecting the right Cloud Hosting managed services provider (MSP).
But first let us understand the basics of what cloud managed services are and how it can make your business resilient.
What are Cloud Managed Services?
Cloud Managed Services include either the partial or complete management and control of a client’s cloud platform consisting of migration, maintenance & optimization.
Businesses often outsource cloud managed services to cloud managed service providers for ensuring expert handling of resources and high availability.
Who are Cloud Managed Service Providers?
A cloud managed service provider is a company offering a cloud-based platform, infrastructure, application or storage services.
Just like a car owner pays for the fuel and maintenance of the car, companies typically have to pay only for the amount of cloud services they use as per their unique business needs.
Why Does Your Business Need a Cloud Service Provider?
Hiring Cloud service providers offer businesses a wide range of benefits. You get the advantage of scalability & flexibility without limiting your business growth.
In addition, cloud service providers like VC ERP Consulting are supporting modern-day businesses in many different ways –- Empower your business to grow at a pace by managing Hardware maintenance, software patching and regular updates
- Spend less time fiddling with technology and focus more on critical business operations
- Efficient cloud resource allocation for cost optimization
- Drive collaboration & innovation within employees to work on projects
What are the Capabilities of a Cloud Service Provider for SAP?
Cloud service providers offer access to cloud computing services such as –- Well-versed and experienced on RISE with SAP offering
- Well-versed on the difference between RISE with SAP and Grow with SAP
- Expert at SAP Business Technology Capabilities
- Infrastructure Networks
- Expert at Development, Extensibility and Integration (Cloud Platform Integration/CPI)
- Experienced at SAP Database Services and in case of SAP Business One well-versed with Ms SQL database as well
- Expert at Data Management such as SAP BW/4HANA and other Data Warehousing Solutions for SAP
- Experienced at Hyperscaler Cloud Services management to offer superior Cloud Storage
- Expert at Cloud Solutions and Services including but not limited to Virtualization
- Can strategically offer guidance on creating or utilizing platforms to deploy applications
- Has the knowledge to implement and use Ready-to-use application softwares
Now that we understand the basics about cloud computing services & service providers, let us dive deeper to the next crucial step of selecting the best cloud managed services provider.
5 Questions to Ask Before Selecting a Cloud Managed Services Provider
Your cloud managed service provider plays the most important role to leverage the best benefits out of your SAP S/4HANA. Once you have made up your mind to migrate your on-premise SAP S/4HANA to MS Azure Cloud, it is the right time to start looking for a managed services provider.
However, not all cloud MSPs are the same. By asking these questions you can quickly choose the right cloud MSP from the list. Cloud experts at VC ERP Consulting answer these questions to make the journey of choosing the right Cloud MSP easy for industry leaders.
1. What are your Cloud Security Management offerings?
SAP on MS Azure is delivered using the IaaS cloud model. The experts ensure that security protections are built into the service by the cloud provider itself, in this case, Microsoft at –- Physical Datacenter
- Physical Network
- Physical Hosts
The right cloud hosting managed services provider ensures that your streamlined business processes stay in place preserving your business continuity.
2. Is migrating on Azure Cloud Computing a good idea?
Migrating your on-premise SAP S/4HANA to MS Azure allows your business to manage the largest SAP HANA workloads with the largest certified public cloud for SAP. The right cloud hosting MSP ensures that you get to extract the maximum advantage from your SAP S/4HANA Solution on cloud.
Moreover with SAP on MS Azure, you can even handle transactions and analytics in-memory on a single data copy to
- accelerate your business processes,
- gain business intelligence &
- efficiently reduce the complexity of your IT environment.
3. How does database backup, management & monitoring work with a managed cloud services provider for SAP?
Databases powering your SAP ERP & BI solutions are mission critical workloads that require a low recovery point objective (RPO) & fast recovery time objective (RTO).
It is essentially like a “stop-loss” configuration for your data in times of crisis.
Retain your backups for years, based on the retention duration configured using the built-in lifecycle management capability customized as per your needs.
4. Do you have Disaster Recovery processes in place?
The right service provider implements effective D/R solutions for mission critical SAP systems to prevent losses and preserve business continuity.
Microsoft Azure is the “to go” platform for your SAP workloads and allows you to implement many D/R scenarios including On-premises to Azure.
The right cloud MSP will understand how to perform disruptive and non-disruptive D/R drills, keeping a balance of both to ensure D/R processes are efficient, up-to-date & quick. These D/R processes can be felt across your solution – database layer, application layer to the front-end.
5. What about my network security & compliance?
The right cloud MSP lays utmost importance on network security & compliance. They believe that a good network security system reduces the risk of falling victim to data theft and sabotage.
Network security helps protect your workstations from harmful spyware. It further ensures that shared data is kept secure.
You can scout for something along these lines. At VC ERP Consulting we provide below services for network security & compliance:
Resource Based Access Control & Resource Locking- Role-based access control (RBAC) provides fine-grained access for the management of MS Azure resources
- Limit access and control permissions on Azure resources for the various teams within your IT operations
- Single-sign-on (SSO) provides the foundation for integrating SAP and Microsoft products.
- Network security groups (NSG) contains a list of security rules that allows or denies network traffic to resources within your MS Azure VNet
- NSGs can be associated with subnets or individual network interfaces attached to VMs
- Security rules can be configured based on source/destination, port & protocol
- Default encryption method set as MS Azure Storage service encryption on your MS Azure Storage account
- Data is encrypted/decrypted transparently using 256-bit AES
- Apply customer-specific security controls to the operating system, database and the SAP application layer
Migrate Your SAP to MS Azure with VC ERP to get the best of both worlds now!
As a trusted Microsoft Gold Partner, VC ERP offers managed services for SAP solutions hosted on Azure. In addition, as an award-winning SAP Gold Partner, we get you the best industry implementation of your ERP, Business Intelligence, RPA & other Connected Solutions.
Cloud hosting experts at VC ERP Consulting are committed to guide businesses to leverage the most out of their SAP workloads by migrating their SAP Solutions on MS Azure. Our 21+ years of extensive industry experience and rich knowledge makes us the best Cloud Managed Services Provider.
Our in-house cloud experts jot down cloud services which makes us unique and the right choice for a cloud MSP.
- Optimize Network Maintenance Costs
- Enterprise-grade data security
- Fast response time through enterprise-level monitoring
- On-demand scalability
- 24*7 Customer Support
Focus on growing your business and let us set up, manage and protect your MS Azure Cloud environment.
Get in touch with our expert consultants & advisors at VC ERP Consulting for free consultation today! Call +91 7948998911 (India), Whatsapp +254 111229970 (Kenya), Call +1 469 915 6026 (North America) (North America) or drop an E-mail at sayhello@vc-erp.com
