This is a guest post written by Chris Pomeroy, Vice President Solutions Architecture, Syntax

In a recent survey, 47% of respondents said that running SAP applications on the cloud was an important part of their IT strategy. Your business may be considering a cloud migration for your SAP workloads but you have questions around the following topics:

• Security—what are the security options in the cloud?
• Reliability and availability—how do you best architect for availability in the cloud?
• Compliance and governance—how are these achieved in the cloud?
• Cost—how does the value of the cloud compare?
• Strategy—do you have a cloud strategy?

Build your cloud foundation on a Maximum Availability Architecture

For many companies, ensuring your systems are available and reliable is a priority. After all, these systems are critical to your business, and this has led to the popularity of a managed cloud solution. A managed cloud is designed around high availability to help eliminate single points of failure in the IT infrastructure.

Moving to the cloud can help reduce the cost of resources to manage software, maintain hardware, and back up data. Instead, cloud vendors and cloud service providers can help with the responsibility of uptime and availability by delivering consistent monitoring and support as part of their service level agreements.

When you migrate and run SAP workloads to the AWS Cloud, you can also reduce risk. For example, by using multiple AWS Regions, you can store data in multiple locations around the world to eliminate single points of failure. SAP HANA System Replication offers automatic takeover, meaning you can automatically switch from your primary to secondary systems in the event of a service disruption.

In this process, virtual hostnames are employed so that users and technical components don’t have to change anything when an HA failover occurs. During an HA failover event, the SUSE Linux OS cluster software initiates a takeover using the HanaSR agent and the related OS commands. Fencing is configured to avoid cluster split-brain issues where there is a network failure.

In terms of reliability, SAP ABAP SAP Central Services (ASCS) enables enqueue replication and automatic failover. Volume snapshots and images are replicated to another Region and you use the Amazon Elastic File System for dynamic shared storage. This is also known as a Maximum Availability Architecture.

Figure 1 shows Syntax’s Maximum Availability Architecture

Drive efficiencies in your cloud environment

Another common customer interest is the desire to work as efficiently as possible from a cost and resourcing standpoint.

At Syntax, we call this “right-sizing” an environment. We help examine your AWS services and infrastructure to assess consumption, storage, and compute. We then make recommendations regarding the optimal usage to meet your business needs. We can provide a cloud readiness or architecture design session for SAP on AWS.

Managing cloud resources usage

Additionally, it is important for companies to offer an internal, self-service cloud portal. This can enable employees to access multiple cloud services, and automatically calculate how much resource usage to charge back to each project or department. This is invaluable for budgeting and for building up audit trails for compliance purposes.

Syntax: Optimizing cloud migration for your unique business needs

With over 40 years of experience, Syntax is a large independent ERP services provider with expertise and certifications across AWS and SAP. Syntax supports full-suite SAP and adjacent workloads, including cloud migration, hosting, and management services. Syntax is an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner and an SAP Gold Partner, with more than 200 accreditations and certifications.

Syntax services and tools can help you successfully initiate and execute an SAP migration project:

• Syntax Enterprise Care® is an advanced monitoring and alerting tool that gives you visibility into your AWS environment. You can use it to monitor infrastructure, disaster recovery (DR) and backup, latency, databases, logs, as well as for technical purging and robust alerting capabilities.
• The Syntax Cloud Portal enables you to track all your SAP infrastructure and resources in one place for maximum efficiency.

To learn more, read our whitepaper: Migrating Mission-Critical SAP Applications to AWS