The Must-Know Guide to SAP Cloud Optimization: Secure, Uninterrupted, and Streamlined

October 1, 2024 | By: Sherry Yu

According to a recent survey, 60% of organizations are already running, implementing, or piloting SAP. And another 26% are preparing their business case. Is your organization ready for the 2027 deadline?

Are you migrating your SAP environment to the cloud? Don’t make the move without the key strategies to keep your operations running smoothly and securely. In our now available on-demand webinar, Sabine Soellheim and I talk about the biggest challenges of cloud-based SAP deployment.

In the webinar, we explain:

the main challenges of deploying SAP in the cloud and streamlining operations
how to prevent costly downtime
how to close security gaps
SUSE’s latest innovation with SAP around a hybrid integration runtime offered as part of SAP Integration Suite.

Watch now

Here is a sneak preview of some of the points we discussed during the webinar.

What are your deployment options?

If you deploy HANA on premises, you or your managed service provider have full control over the whole stack, from the hardware level and the operating system, up to the SAP HANA database layer and the application layer. But if you go for an IaaS deployment on public cloud, your cloud provider takes responsibility for the hardware layer, leaving you responsible for the three software layers above that – OS, database, and apps.

SAP GROW and RISE are two new options that are offered by SAP. Both are based on SAP S/4HANA Cloud. GROW is a SaaS offering targeting new and midsize customers, whereas RISE is a PaaS offering based on SAP S/4HANA Private Edition. In the webinar, we discuss the RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud, Roles and Responsibilities Documents and Service Description, which is critical to your daily operations.

If you go for RISE with SAP, then SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) for SAP is the only Linux operating system supported, including for high availability solutions.

Deployment and management challenges

The main challenges organizations face when deploying and managing SAP in the cloud include security, downtime, complexity, the learning curve, availability, configuration drift, visibility, and lifecycle management.

Clear solutions to complex challenges

In the webinar, we illustrate a solution that bundles together all the technical elements you need to manage your SAP cloud environment – including the operating system, accelerated installation, and high availability cluster management – enabling you to standardize and streamline your SAP operations, whether you deploy on premises, on private or public cloud, or on RISE with SAP.

SUSE is the developer of the high availability solutions for SAP HANA and S/4HANA with a track record of over a decade collaboration with SAP to safeguard world’s largest SAP workloads. SUSE Automation for SAP speeds up the deployment of not just SAP but the infrastructure as well. SUSE Manager takes care of the lifecycle management and enhances security. Proactive monitoring gains insights and prevents minor issues from accumulating into major outages. Auto-tuning optimizes the running instances based on SAP requirements. SUSE also provides hardening and pre-hardened cloud images based on STIG and CIS. Together with AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, we create reference architectures and documentation to help customers.

Six Reasons the SUSE Solution for SAP is a Standout:

Security – An incident like the recent CrowdStrike outage simply wouldn’t have happened with the SUSE Linux Enterprise family of solutions. It’s the only OS that’s ELA 4+ certified, it has granular rollback capabilities, offers better hardening than commercial images, and its live patching covers both the user space and kernel.
Downtime – We reduce unplanned downtime with automated failover of HANA system replication that supports scale-up and scale-out across various scenarios. And we help you reduce planned downtime by patching HANA via rolling updates in the cluster. Live Patching allows you to avoid rebooting for up to 12 months.
Complexity – SUSE provides reassurance when implementing complex SAP environments on public cloud, publishing numerous validated reference architectures for AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. All these cloud providers offer automated services for SAP deployment that support SLES for SAP Applications.
Learning curve – We get you up the curve faster by providing saptune, an intelligent, lightweight daemon for auto-tuning your SAP environment so your team doesn’t need to learn how to tune manually.
High availability – SUSE develops high availability solutions in collaboration with SAP to protect customers from expensive business disruptions. The most recent example is the fast-dying HANA indexserver HA solution that reduces recovery time after indexserver failures from hours to minutes.
Safeguarding your SAP landscape – Trento, part of SLES for SAP, is a single GUI tool that reveals the setup and health of your SAP landscape, and it’s increasingly integrated with SUSE Manager, so all your issues are flagged in one place. SUSE Manager also ensures compliance across development, QA, and production environments. SUSE Manage is the only commercial tool that manages mixed Linux environments.

Connect On-Premises Applications and Data with the Cloud

Sometimes, part of your SAP setup needs to run on-premise for privacy, security, or compliance reasons. In such scenarios, SAP has introduced SAP Edge Integration Cell to facilitate this process. SUSE is one of the first partners to support SAP Edge Integration Cell. (Here, ‘edge’ just means ‘outside of SAP cloud’.) SAP Edge Integration Cell is a containerized application. While containerization may present a learning curve, SUSE Rancher offers a reassuring solution. As part of SAP’s reference architecture SUSE Rancher is supported to provide a reliable and scalable Kubernetes environment. This is a demonstration of our co-innovation with SAP. For a deeper technical understanding, catch Sabine’s detailed explanation in the webinar.