Blog

With so much talk about how best to adapt to a crisis, and how to use a crisis as an opportunity for innovative problem-solving, it’s no surprise that cloud technology solutions are taking centerstage. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, I had many discussions with businesses that had established a multi-year digital transformation plan, so the need to change now wasn’t considered an immediate necessity. But the pandemic forced many businesses to switch their focus on implementing today rather than waiting.

In order for businesses to remain operational during the lockdown, the need to quickly pivot and continue operations in a new post-pandemic reality meant making important but immediate and necessary changes.

Now more than ever, we’re witnessing how possible it is to leverage technology in previously unimaginable ways to aid businesses willing to face challenges for the sake of business continuity. But as eager as many are, similar questions arise:

“Will an integrated ERP solution scale as my business grows?”

“How can I run in real-time and drive profit?”

“Can change be affordable?”

Now is the best time to establish priorities, so your business can accelerate its digital transformation and increase resilience post-pandemic. And now is the best time to consider moving from on-premise to the cloud.

Enter SAP Business One Cloud, now in the cloud!

With SAP Business One, you’ve already made the investment to strengthen your business, giving it the advantage of industry-leading software that provides:

• Real-time information from across your entire organization—accounting and finance; sales and customer relationship management; inventory, warehousing, and distribution; purchasing; reporting and production orders; and
• Allows you to make smarter business decisions—spend more time running your business and less on IT costs.
• Robust and scalable designed to effectively streamline processes.
• Keeps data safe and secure in a cloud environment.
• Allows you to access everything from anywhere, and any time—when many of us are working remote to stave off the pandemic, reliable access to all your information is vital.

But businesses are consistently being challenged by factors that can often be out of their control—that doesn’t mean you can’t continue to build a more resilient business and optimize costs.

How can you so this? By migrating from on-premise to cloud, you’ll achieve the scale and security you need to meet today’s business challenges and prepare for whatever tomorrow has to offer.

The Options

Private cloud? Public cloud? What’s the difference?

Understanding the distinction between cloud options is essential, and finding the right model for your needs is key. And consider these questions: Are you a small business or start-up concerned with costs? Do you have a mixed computing and investment strategy that would dictate what is the best cloud option for you?

Cloud is a type of computing that uses servers, networks, storage, development tools, and other applications are enabled through the internet. It’s an appealing model for many organizations, since investment costs are low and there is no need to purchase equipment, train employees, and provide ongoing maintenance—a cloud hosting provider can handle these for you.

Private Cloud Hosted—Managed Services

If your business is weary about sharing computing resources on a public cloud, then a private, managed service is ideal—it is a customized, business-specific solution run by a third-party provider on behalf of the client. It’s a private cloud with dedicated resources for each client and is extremely stable. A private cloud environment also gives you complete control over data and security.

• Customers have dedicated servers and resources in these cloud environments.
• Go beyond just the need of your SAP software and extend the ability of your SAP implementation with add-ons or third-party solutions, with minor restrictions.
• The number of users can be scaled up or down as needed with ease.
• Can host SQL or HANA installations of SAP.
• Access to data and analytics is unrestricted, and connecting your data to BI tools or connecting directly to the database for reporting is possible, with minor restrictions.
  Responsibilities specific to the hosting partner:
  • Provisioning of hardware and software with minimal need for external IT resources.
  • Manage backup schedules for your SAP databases.
  
  Responsibilities specific to the customer:
  • Do not include the network interactions between your virtual servers and on-premise servers (customer needs IT to manage internal infrastructure to ensure connectivity to this cloud environment).

SAP-Hosted Public Cloud

Basically speaking, any shared public cloud has multiple organizations sharing the same infrastructure. When you connect to a public cloud, this means you’re accessing computing resources hosted on data centres that are managed by third parties, and you’re being connected via an internet connection—these resources are not on-premise, so you don’t own the resources (such as servers) and you don’t maintain them.

• Your SAP environment is on shared servers with other SAP customers.
• Only cloud certified add-ons can be installed in SAP’s Public Cloud, which may limit some customers.
• Customers must be on SAP HANA (SAP does not have a cloud environment for SQL customers).
• Access to data and analytics is restricted to either offline copies of data or running analytics within the SAP application (i.e., BI tools cannot be connected).
  Responsibilities specific to the hosting partner:
  • This is a cloud environment that hosts and manages all your SAP software and hardware needed for your organization to run SAP Business One.
  
  Responsibilities specific to the customer:
  • Organizations may require technical environments outside of the SAP cloud for other aspects of their business; these environments must be managed by the customer’s IT team.

Private Cloud–Non-Managed Services

The private, non-managed cloud essentially means your business is paying for resources based on what it uses. This is a great option for controlling costs and helping businesses scale.

• These cloud environments offer a high degree of flexibility to scale resources as needed.
• These environments are provisioning servers for our customers.
• Most flexible in terms for allowing add-ons and extensions, or accessing your data directly for BI purposes.
  Responsibilities specific to the hosting partner:
  • You’re not required to manage any of the hardware components.
    
  • You’ll be required to hire an IT team to manage the environments and software.
  Responsibilities specific to the customer:

The Flexibility

Our SAP Business One Practice Experts support our customers in both private and public cloud hosted environments. You can select a standard licensing model, or combine it with SAP Business One Cloud using subscription licensing and cloud hosting. Since running in the cloud saves you on investments like hardware infrastructure and hiring IT experts to manage and support the solution, the total cost of ownership is reduced. And unlike other software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, SAP Business One costs are tailored to your needs and simple to understand with terms based on the number of users and the contract duration.

The Support

We support every aspect of cloud migration, securely and efficiently—and all based on your needs and terms—with local experts who understand your business and its needs, so you can spend more time focusing on your business and less time and money on managing and securing your infrastructure.

The Why

With SAP Business One Cloud, your organization can deploy software quickly across your entire business, so you can accelerate time-to-value and quickly see your investment work with the benefits of an integrated approach to business management. And it will help you effectively run a leaner, smarter, more connected business that is agile and ready for almost anything. Whether it’s a pandemic or a different set of critical circumstances that can generally impact your business, I’m confident that SAP Business One Cloud is an exceptional choice for you.

Eager to see how the cloud can open doors of opportunity for your business? We’re ready to help you at every stage of your cloud migration.

Let’s talk!