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Understanding Your Options

Migrating to the cloud is a complex process, that must be customized to address the technical, functional and
operational needs of the organization. A successful migration strategy should address short-term aims, like
decreasing hosting costs, as well as longer-term goals like better alignment between IT and business objectives.
Here are the three main cloud migration strategies businesses use to meet those goals.
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A lift-and-shift migration is exactly what it sounds like: lifting an application or landscape out of its current hosting
environment and shifting it to another environment — for example, from on-premise hosting to a public cloud. Lift-
and-shift migrations transport an exact copy of the top three layers: application, database and OS layer. Gartner refers
to this as rehosting, because it involves moving your stack to a new host without making extensive changes. This
enables a rapid, cost-e ective migration, minimal disruption and quick ROI.

A lift and shift from on-premise to cloud hosting also increases agility, simplifying future transformation. This makes it
a good rst step for businesses with a conservative culture, or indecision about long-term cloud strategy. However, as
Gartner points out, the lack of modi cation to your system also prevents you from harnessing certain cloud migration
bene ts in the short term:
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“The primary advantage of IaaS — that teams can migrate systems quickly, without modifying their architecture — can
be its primary disadvantage as bene ts from the cloud characteristics of the infrastructure, such as scalability, will be
missed”.

Companies need to weigh the quick payo and low disruption of a lift and shift against the greater bene ts of a more
transformative cloud migration strategy.

Replatforming

Replatforming is really a variation of lift and shift, involving some further adjustments to improve your landscape in
some way. In fact AWS General Manager Stephen Orban refers to replatforming as “lift-tinker-and-shift.”
Replatforming empowers businesses to accomplishing important goals beyond rehosting without greatly expanding
the scope of the project:

“Here you might make a few cloud (or other) optimizations in order to achieve some tangible bene t, but you aren’t
otherwise changing the core architecture of the application. You may be looking to reduce the amount of time you
spend managing database instances by migrating to a database-as-a-service platform… or a fully managed
platform.”

For SAP users, replatforming can be a useful step for accomplishing particular goals like increasing system
performance or adopting a managed services. For example, it can enable SAP ECC users in conservative
organizations to audition a vendor and alleviate skepticism about digital transformation, while laying the groundwork
for a future HANA migration.

Strategy #2: Technical Migration

Technical (SAP HANA) Migration: Source and Target can be on-premise, private or public cloud.

Technical migration maintains existing applications, but upgrades the OS and DB to meet certain transformational
goals. As a cloud migration strategy, this is often done in part to harness cloud native features such as scalability or
automation, but it also has other bene ts. For example, migrating from on-premise SAP ECC to Suite on HANA in the
public cloud gives organizations the bene t from HANA’s real-time visibility and dramatically increased performance,
in addition to the bene ts of the public cloud.

A technical migration can also prepare organizations for a future application migration. In the case of SAP, ECC users
often migrate to Suite on HANA as a rst step on the road to S/4HANA. This enables the organization to minimize
disruption and gain experience in the cloud, which they can use to plan the next stage of their transformation.

Strategy #3: Application Migration

Application (S/4HANA) Migration: Source & Target can be on-premise, private or public cloud

In an application migration, the application layer is transformed, along with the OS and DB. There are three basic
strategies for application migration: new system implementation, system conversion and landscape transformation.

New System Implementation

New system implementation essentially means starting over. Although data is generally preserved and transferred in
this process, the applications are either rebuilt from scratch by developers, or replaced with new, o -the-shelf
applications.

Needless to say, this can be a complicated process. The organization needs to ensure that all functionality is
replicated by the new system, along with business process ow. Old data must be audited, discarded where
appropriate and reformatted to work with the new system. On top of that, there’s the requirement to retrain the team
in a new suite of applications, which might function quite di erently from the previous application stack.

However, in some scenarios this cloud migration strategy is the most cost e ective choice. For example, if an
organization is upgrading from a highly customized legacy landscape with poor documentation, auditing the code
and designing an upgrade and migration path might be more costly and time-consuming than rebuilding the
landscape.

New system implementation is also the correct strategy for organizations who wish to switch to a new application
stack, rather than staying with their existing vendor. As Gartner points out, the bene ts of a new set of cloud-native
tools often outweigh the costs of adapting to a new system — particularly for development:

“Although rebuilding requires losing the familiarity of existing code and frameworks, the advantage of rebuilding an
application is access to innovative features in the provider’s platform. They improve developer productivity, such as
tools that allow application templates and data models to be customized, metadata-driven engines, and communities
that supply pre-built components.”

System Conversion

Also known as brown eld migration, a system conversion transforms your application layer, along with the DB and OS
layers. The process may involve extensive changes to the way your landscape is run and managed as well as the
landscape itself. Your new, upgraded system will likely have greater automation, and require di erent competencies
than your on-premise legacy system. That may warrant a change to a managed services model, and a new approach
to management emphasizing proactive planning. Properly handled, that means more consistent performance, lower
cost and less downtime in the future. It can also free up your internal IT team to focus on strategic goals, rather than
putting out res.

Getting there is a complex process, however, which requires a reliable technical team. The system conversion should
be planned carefully, with downtime scheduled to minimize disruption. Look for a partner who can accomplish the
process with a single downtime — the shorter, the better.

Brown eld migration is the most common path for an SAP cloud migration from ECC to S/4HANA. It may be done as
a second project following a technical migration to Suite on HANA, or as a single, multi-stage process.

Landscape Transformation

Landscape Transformation is an SAP product and process, but it’s also a more general cloud migration strategy. A
landscape transformation combines a system conversion with a signi cant change to the way your landscape is
structured. Landscape transformation scenarios include:

Combining multiple ERP landscapes into a single system to meet the needs of a business consolidation
Splitting o segments of your data along with certain functional components for a divestiture
Upgrading and migrating multiple regional Suite on HANA landscapes into a single, global S/4HANA landscape

Landscape transformation enables you to meet business goals, technical and functional upgrade requirements with
a single upgrade process. This can signi cantly accelerate transformation, reduce overall downtime and control costs
when compared to multiple projects.

Making Your Cloud Migration Strategy a Success

Choosing a migration strategy is easy. Designing and implementing it is the challenge. Many upgrade and migration
projects run into delays, cost overruns and other problems that can reduce ROI, or even disrupt your IT strategy.
Protera’s FlexBridge Migration Services Platform provides SAP customers with a proven, cost-e ective path to the
cloud, accelerating migration by 70% — and eliminating the risks of cloud migration.

Check out our short Protera FlexBridge overview to learn how we plan and execute successful SAP HANA and
S/4HANA migrations, or contact us for a free migration assessment report for your landscape.

Photo Credit: © kentoh/Bigstock

By Patrick Osterhaus | August 21st, 2018 | Categories: Cloud Migrations

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About the Author: Patrick Osterhaus

As President and Chief Technology O cer for Protera, Patrick Osterhaus is responsible for driving the
company’s technology vision for innovative enterprise computing systems delivered to our valued
customers. Prior to founding Protera, Patrick worked as a Senior Technical Consultant at SAP America.
As a strategic SAP thought leader, Patrick has co-authored executive white papers, industry articles
on various SAP topics including Cloud Computing, and is a sought-after presenter in the SAP ecosystem.

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