Understand your path to SAP S/4HANA (updated)

By 2025, SAP will no longer support SAP ECC 6, the core component of SAP ERP. This means you will need to upgrade your SAP systems. But what are your best upgrade options?

There are three basic SAP cloud migration paths. Companies that want to start off slowly can undergo a traditional SAP cloud migration, moving their assets into the cloud without moving to SAP HANA at all. This allows you to show ROI quickly from running in the cloud while minimizing initial disruption and lets you wait for the major SAP HANA and S/4HANA upgrade for a later date.

Another option is migrating to Suite on HANA — with SAP ECC 6.0 Enhancement Pack 7 running on a HANA database. This gives you all the incremental benefits of HANA, such as faster performance and compatibility with newer applications and will get you close to a full S/4HANA landscape.

However, most companies will benefit from moving directly to S/4HANA. In most cases, a complete upgrade and migration will be less disruptive and less costly than several smaller upgrades and the new functionality will provide a major competitive advantage right away.

Deployment options for SAP S/4HANA

• Cloud - Public Cloud - SAP offers a pure Public Cloud option—Software-as-as-Service (SaaS)—such as SAP Cloud, Google Cloud Platform, AWS, or Azure, to name a few, which hosts and manages the entire HANA infrastructure, including the quarterly upgrades. This option can also be managed through the public cloud provider, internally or by an SAP partner like Approyo. 
• Cloud - Private Cloud - Under a private cloud setup, the HANA infrastructure operates on a private cloud exclusive for the use of an organization. This scenario can be managed internally or by a third-party and can be hosted internally or externally. It works best for companies looking for on-demand scalability, complete management control, and security prioritization for their IT assets while combining both on-premise and cloud solutions. 
• Hybrid Cloud - The Hybrid Cloud option involves using a cloud provider as either IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) or PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service).  With either option, the organization must manage a portion of their on-premise assets and associated services while the rest of the portions are managed by the Cloud service provider.
• On-premise - On-premise deployment is hosting SAP S/4HANA in your own data center, which isn’t mandated by SAP’s upgrade cycle. Under this scenario, the HANA appliances are hosted on partners/customers’ existing data centers. 

Read the full blog post on www.approyo.com