Cloud – if not now, when?

More and more organizations are taking the leap to the cloud after seeing the benefits that quicker adopters are enjoying. When you move your SAP applications to cloud, you access unlimited capacity and performance resources that allows you to scale the system up or down depending on the workload. These benefits are manifold and can be realized quickly– innovation-powered growth (through AI, ML, automation, and analytics-driven strategy) flexibility, economies of scale, speed, productivity, cost savings, increasing sustainability, and security.  In recent years’ cloud adoption has gone from being more than just a strategic business decision and sensible investment, to a must in order to agilely run an organization and to build a competitive advantage.

And cloud is only accelerating – according to a market research the global cloud computing market is expected to grow from USD 445.3 billion in 2021 to 947.3 billion by 2026, and according to Gartner, by 2025, 85% of enterprises will have cloud-first principle. With all the uptake, you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s simple. But with the cloud services market continuing to grow apace with an ever-widening spectrum of models and approaches it can be difficult to know where to start and which experts and vendors are the right fit.

There are many questions – ‘Should we opt for a private cloud? Public cloud? Hybrid cloud? Or multi cloud? Which cloud computing services should we use? Should it be Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platforms-as-a-Service (PaaS), or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)? How to manage a hybrid cloud estate with multiple providers?’ Cloud can be a complicated topic. There are almost as many cloud approaches in computing as there are cloud types in meteorology! It must be exactly the right fit for a given organization; a totally bespoke approach, but yet ‘out-of-the-box’ enough, and with enough defined use cases and accelerators to ensure a swift and smooth migration.

The pandemic brought about a vital inflection point to adoption. Business agility became a must; preserving cash, optimizing IT cost, ensuring resiliency, and securing and supporting a remote workforce became the pressing needs of the moment. To run and maintain a profitable business, agility became key. COVID-19 has required every company to considerably accelerate their cloud migration to create a basis for end-to-end, scalable digital transformation.

In my role as Head of Capgemini’s Global SAP2Cloud Offer and SAP2Cloud Transformation I’m aware of client challenges in adopting cloud, and the vital importance of listening to and even anticipating the needs that an inevitable move to the cloud inspires. Some of the everyday triggers like data explosion, enhanced interest in SAP HANA and greater need for operational resilience. I know that cloud can be as much about finding the right expertise and implementing the right strategy in the organization as it is about the technology. Given the significant change required for  a move to the cloud, you need the right change management strategy, a detailed migration strategy, insights, and accelerators, to reduce risk and minimize effort and cost.

Our approach is to make migration to the cloud as pain-free, straight-forward, and risk-free as possible – with our SAP2 Cloud offer for example – a cloud agnostic and vendor-neutral approach with accelerators that help customers migrate, operate, and innovate in the public cloud – organizations can go to the cloud, and enjoy the benefits, with no CAPEX; there’s only OPEX to pay monthly or quarterly or whenever they prefer. And by virtue of being set up in the cloud, organizations are then primed for a full S/4HANA transformation; they can transition more easily. With the prevailing support for SAP ECC platform ending in 2027 and all the core SAP products being revamped for the SAP S/4HANA database, the time is now for organizations to consider transforming their SAP platforms.

So, with recent trends in cloud computing indicating that enterprises will continue to embrace multi-cloud and hybrid cloud strategies and are spending with vendors increasingly across the board, the question for organizations isn’t so much ‘If?’ but rather ‘How?’

To read my insights on upcoming cloud trends for 2022, look out for my second blog in this series.

For more info on Capgemini’s approach to cloud visit: https://www.capgemini.com/be-en/service/cloud-services/

Author

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Devendra Goyal
Head – Global SAP2Cloud Offer & SAP2Cloud Transformation