Going to the cloud? Look before you quantum leap with an expert assessment.

So, let’s say an organization, recognizing the benefits, has decided to shift their SAP landscape to the cloud. The myriad benefits – of reduced costs, scalability, mobility, sustainability, greater control, reliability, security, rapid future digital innovations and better business continuity model– are within reach, but to get these benefits they first must understand which cloud option best fits their business plan. It can be a daunting task.

Questions arise like:

• How do you make sure the migration is hassle-free and risks are mitigated?
• Do you have an accurate view of your SAP landscape and inter-dependencies?
• What is the value proposition for moving to the Public Cloud?

Finding exactly the right strategy for your cloud migration first requires a careful, and expert assessment that evaluates your existing IT infrastructure and provides analysis on cost benefit, security, and the entire scope of risk factors associated with a migration to the cloud.

I get a great deal of personal satisfaction helping organizations precisely assess their migration needs in my role as the Global Head of Capgemini SAP2Cloud Transformation. We deploy our proven SAP2Cloud Transformation Assessment approach that helps clients identify the IT infrastructure and applications that can be moved to the cloud effortlessly and realize the true potential and ROI of hosting and managing SAP landscapes on public cloud.

It’s imperative to bring a cloud agnostic assessment of needs with which instances are mapped and organizations are given multiple best options on how to consolidate their infrastructure as well as applications with a minimum administrative overhead. It’s about helping clients make informed decisions with minimized risks while ensuring SLAs are maintained post-migration.

To make sure that migrating a landscape to public cloud is smooth and hassle-free, it’s imperative to:

• Assess SAP technology to create actionable insights with optimization opportunities.
• Accelerate cloud adoption by ensuring all applications and infrastructure components respond positively to migration.
• Define the migration approach and provide a clear roadmap for migrating applications to the public cloud.

In my experience I’ve seen how vital it is to facilitate early planning discussions with close collaboration, to arrive at a joint understanding of migration strategy, approach, and cost estimates with the customer. If a client can be provided with a wide range of off-the-shelf use cases; complete migration scenarios, with a standardized and industrialized yet agile approach, the migration can unfold in a seamless and smooth way. Any concerns the client has on data security and compliance and disaster recovery must be addressed – as data secured in less than an optimal way can of course have a huge impact on public trust and reputation.

Cloud gives organizations the ability, in the event of a disaster, to quickly recover critical systems with secure remote access to a virtual environment. But choosing the right kind of disaster recovery with cloud is no easy task. As well as data needing to be absolutely secure and at-the-ready it also needs to be granular. Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation is one example of why organizations need the ability to swiftly grab, with a granular precision, specific files without, in the process, scooping up any prohibited data.

Cloud has become more than a trend – it’s the key to achieving agility and relevance, but before migration organizations need to understand exactly where they stand in order to get where they want to be; to realize their optimal to-be state. An expert cloud assessment is the crucial first step.

To learn more about Capgemini’s approach to SAP – https://www.capgemini.com/service/cloud-services/

Author

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Devendra Goyal
Head – Global SAP2Cloud Offer & SAP2Cloud Transformation