In many companies the business application system landscapes over time have become very large and extremely complex. This scale and complexity slows down innovation, because even a small change can have a huge impact on the whole system landscape. The impact could be business process related, so extensive testing in all affected systems is required. The change could also impact system landscape infrastructure, which might result in ordering additional hardware or upgrading the affected database or operating system. All these steps are time consuming, cost money and involve different experts in specific knowledge areas. This is the opposite of what the business expects. A move to the cloud would improve this situation in many business areas.

In this article you will learn how about SAP HANA Cloud, it’s position in the SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) and how the SAP BTP and SAP HANA Cloud fit into the SAP Intelligent Enterprise vision.

The SAP Intelligent Enterprise vision helps companies to become an intelligent enterprise,
enabling companies to make impactful changes to run their business better by growing more
resilient, more profitable, and more sustainable.

What is SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) ?

The SAP BTP provides ONE unified and connected platform for all data-driven innovations to turn DATA to into VALUE. This is orchestrated by the solutions Database & Data Management, Analytics, Application Development & Integration Services and Intelligent Technologies. The SAP Business Technology Platform is built to fit into deployment scenarios that are best aligned with your company’s growth strategy, whether it’s cloud, on-premise, hybrid or multi[1]cloud strategy. With the SAP BTP, you can make confident decisions and re-imagine business processes that provide Exceptional Experiences to your customers, employees and partners to succeed in the Experience Economy. The journey to the cloud to become an Intelligent Enterprise isn’t something that far away on the horizon, it’s happening right now. Research shows that by 2022 almost 75% of all databases will be deployed or migrated to a cloud platform1 Reasons for moving to the cloud are:

• Data explosion in volume size
• The countless number of different data types and data sources
• Flexibility and timely delivery of hardware and software resources
• Lower TCO

Moving to the Cloud is Crucial

When making the move to the cloud, all the above points have to be taking into account as well! It’s not like “storing your data in a cloud” auto-magically make the above pain points go away. A thorough investigation in the capabilities and features of the cloud provider need to be conducted to ensure that all business requirements are met.

SAP HANA CLOUD

SAP HANA Cloud is a fully managed in-memory multi-tier cloud database as a service
(DBaaS). As the cloud-based data foundation for SAP Business Technology Platform, SAP
HANA Cloud integrates data from across the enterprise, enabling faster decisions based on
live data.

SAP HANA Cloud combines several important features in one product. The following features
are part of SAP HANA Cloud:

• Multi-Service Database: Combining the known SAP HANA qualities like in-memory, multi-model, hybrid transaction, and analytics processing in real-time with high volume and extreme transitionally focused services.
• Data On Demand: All data, regardless of size, category, and complexity, available to you whenever you need it.
• Easy Integration: A unified access layer to simplify data processing while consolidating and harmonizing data integration to your intelligent applications.
• Power Of The Cloud: Cloud qualities like low TCO, elasticity, server less principles, high availability, resilience, and autonomous behavior.
• Streamlined Access: Simplified data-access which connects all your information without demanding that all data be loaded into a single storage solution.
• Developer Experience: SAPHANA Cloud provides a integrated development environment in which the developer can develop and model custom applications.

SAP HANA Cloud vs. SAP HANA on-premise

The SAP HANA Cloud, SAP HANA Database is a cloud-native platform that reduces the
complexity of multi-cloud or hybrid system landscapes. SAP HANA Cloud provides all of the
known advanced SAP HANA on-prem technologies for multi-model data processing inmemory or on disk with the benefits of the cloud.

Comparing SAP HANA Cloud with SAP HANA on-prem show that many administrative tasks
are handled as a managed service by the cloud provider. In SAP HANA Cloud the following
administrative tasks are handled by the cloud provider:
● Selection, purchase and provisioning of servers and storage.
● Installing, configuring and upgrading the operating system.
● Installing, configuring and patching the database software.
● Backing up and restoring and recovering the database software.
● Tuning the database to run optimal on the underlying operating system and hardware.
As a database administrator you are still in control and you can deploy new SAP HANA
database instances with the required RAM, CPU and disk resources whenever you need them.
The big advantage is you don’t need to go through the whole hardware buying, configuring
and software installation process.
The automated processes within SAP HANA Cloud make sure the SAP HANA database with
the requested hardware resources is available within minutes instead of weeks or sometimes
months.

Interested to learn more about SAP HANA CLOUD ? check the BTP SAP Discovery Center here https://discovery-center.cloud.sap/serviceCatalog/sap-hana-cloud?region=all

Published by

Ramy Salem , BTP CSP