Investigating Private Cloud Services for SAP S/4HANA

Cloud solutions provide greater flexibility and efficiency, but the fundamental question remains: public or private cloud? Although the level of management typically offered with public cloud packages may satisfy some businesses, you may want to consider the many advantages of running SAP S/4HANA in a private cloud. Here, we put the benefits of private cloud services under the magnifying glass.

Moving your ERP into the cloud has many advantages. It can improve efficiency and agility, and improved data quality and analytical capabilities can contribute to better decision making. The SAP S/4HANA Cloud is well suited to this – and many established businesses may select the private cloud option. However, there are some limitations in terms of flexibility with SAP’s private cloud services.

NTT DATA Business Solutions has developed a comprehensive range of private cloud services to enhance the existing private cloud offering. The NTT DATA Business Solutions Private Cloud Edition for SAP S/4HANA helps you to realize the potential of SAP S/4HANA, and gives you more freedom to select a set of private cloud services that fit your needs. Let’s get to the bottom of the key differences.

Migrate or Start Anew?

Let’s focus on deployment as the first part of our investigation. SAP offers only a greenfield approach for implementing the SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Option. While this provides a fresh start, freeing your business from the constraints of an existing environment, it is not necessarily the best course of action for every business. The advantage of the NTT DATA Business Solutions Private Cloud Edition for SAP S/4HANA is that it makes both greenfield and brownfield implementation possible. This means that if your business is not ready for a major overhaul, you can migrate your data and applications to SAP S/4HANA Cloud, and benefit from a smooth transition.

Scale Up, Scale Down, Scale Out – The Need to Adapt

Every company is unique and grows at a different pace. While a given business might start out with a smaller system capacity or a relatively low number of named users, it may require more private cloud services for support. However, for another business additional private cloud services might not be as important as database size or server performance. These demands can change over time, in both directions. Understanding this, intelligence offers your business the freedom to add private cloud services, but scale down system size — or vice versa — with no difficulty. We’ll discuss scalability options in more detail in our next blog article.

Flexible, Transparent and Fair Licensing

Sometimes it takes real detective work to figure out which licensing arrangement is right for you, because many of them are over-complicated and confusing. We help our customers find a package that perfectly aligns with their requirements, with simple subscription-based payments as well as bring-your-own-license models (BYOL). In addition, we offer multiple bundles of private cloud services that you can choose from. We can help you find the right package for your business, so that you pay only for the services you really need.

Hybrid: The Best of Both Worlds?

There are strong arguments on both sides around the question of choosing public versus private cloud – but for many, a hybrid approach may be the most attractive option, because it offers greater flexibility. NTT DATA Business Solutions offers customers the ability to choose: run your core processes on premise, store sensitive data in a private cloud, and run secondary, standardized processes in a public cloud. Pick the arrangement that best suits your needs, and NTT DATA Business Solutions can support you.

Guidance at Every Stage

Let’s wrap up our investigation with a discussion about consulting – an area where service providers can offer genuine additional value. Once your implementation is up and running, it can be very beneficial to have a partner advise you regarding application development, optimization and enhancement. However, SAP’s own private cloud offering does not include these consulting services.

The good news is that, with NTT DATA Business Solutions Private Cloud Edition for SAP S/4HANA, our experts are available to advise and guide you. We have also developed numerous solutions – we call them AddOns – that extend the functionality of SAP S/4HANA and simplify your core business processes. Working together with your team, we help you to uncover areas for improvement and unlock the potential of SAP’s latest business suite through our private cloud services.

Don’t miss our next blog posts, where we discuss SAP S/4HANA deployment options and the importance of scalability.