More and more enterprises are making strategic decisions to move applications and infrastructure to the cloud.
Like many companies faced with making strategic decisions about their IT infrastructure, our decision point occurred when it came time to launch a new business initiative; the implementation of SAP Business One.
Choosing the right solution
The implementation of SAP Business One meant we needed additional computing power and resources. We had to decide whether to make a sizable capital investment in hardware or if some of the available cloud-based services would be better.
It came down to these three options:
- Hardware Renewal – With this approach, we would replace our on-premises infrastructure with new equipment, with capacity planned for the next 3-5 years. The disaster recovery solution would consist of equivalent hardware in a remote datacenter.
- Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) – The idea was to use an established IaaS provider to run not only our SAP workload, but also our existing infrastructure. We would provision VM’s we needed on demand, and have our SAP consultant assist us in the implementation.
- Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) – SAP Business One is also offered “as-a-service”. With this approach, we would have avoided completely the infrastructure aspect of the project.
From the outset, it quickly became clear that the third option or SaaS was simply not the best option for us, as it was fairly expensive. In addition, this did not resolve the fact that our current on-premises infrastructure was due for renewal.
Comparing Hardware renewal vs IaaS
Our company already had experience moving applications to the cloud, as several of our services were already outsourced, like Office 365 and Telephony. However, implementing a mission–critical application like SAP to the cloud was another story.
These were the three most important criteria for us:
- Physical vs. Cloud costs – We conducted a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) analysis to determine the entire cost of each option over 5 years. In order to do this, we needed to clearly establish the resource requirements of our current workload as well as SAP. Having a precise sizing is key to an accurate TCO as the IaaS costs can vary greatly based on usage.
- Security Concerns – In order to get over our security concerns, we had to clearly understand how things would work on the networking side. In the end, the cloud environment can be made just as secure, if not greater, than most internally managed IT security.
- Optimal Performance – Could a cloud-based system be as fast as on-premises? Would SAP be fast? When our SAP consultant first installed the application in the test environment in the cloud, he was amazed at how fast it was. The important thing we had to do in regards to performance for SAP was to setup a Terminal server in the cloud.
Conclusion
After looking at these points, we concluded that the features and benefits of IaaS made our migration to the cloud the right choice. We developed a roadmap to make the transition efficiently.
Your challenge may be that your servers are getting old or your system has reached its full capacity. Moving to the cloud helps you gain business agility and potentially save money. We have the experience, expertise and proven roadmap to help you with the planning and implementation of a cloud solution.
Take a look at our ebook "5 steps to a more functional and efficient IT infrastructure" for more information.
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