Choose the Right SAP S/4HANA Deployment Option for your Organization

Author: Vinod Immanni

Choosing the right Deployment option that best suit your business needs is one of the most crucial decisions, one should consider when planning an SAP S/4HANA implementation. This decision depends upon your current situation and requirements.

Understanding what is SAP S/4HANA?

Since the launch of SAP R/3, SAP S/4HANA (short for SAP Business Suite 4 SAP HANA) is the SAP’s biggest innovation. The new business suite is only available on the SAP HANA database, the advanced in-memory platform. It also offers a personalized user experience with SAP Fiori and real-time analytics. Compared to previous SAP ERP systems, SAP S/4HANA has many key features such as user experience with new SAP Fiori, Increased efficiency, Deployment options, Simplicity, Workload capacity, Instant reports, and Real-time connectivity to Business, Social media, Big Data, and IoT etc.

In this post, we will focus on various Deployment options available for any businesses looking to take on SAP S/4HANA.

Deployment Options Currently available: -

  1. SAP S/4HANA on-premise
  2. SAP S/4HANA private Cloud
  3. SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud
  4. SAP S/4HANA Hybrid

SAP S/4HANA on-premise: -

An SAP customer can host on-premise version on their own database. It is the most popular hosted S/4HANA. With on-premise, the sap customer should manage everything, which includes applications, servers, HANA database, data centers, operating system, networking, and middleware. The downside of this option is system availability, access, and security.

The on-premise deployment option is the best option for you if we you want to migrate and upgrade from existing SAP ERP system to SAP S/4HANA. With the latest version (SAP S/4HANA 1709), SAP S/4HANA offers stable, more clarity and predictable path for SAP customers.

If a company decided to run their applications and platform on SAP Cloud. The SAP customer must choose whether the application to be hosted on the private cloud (HANA Enterprise Cloud) or public cloud (HANA Cloud Platform).

SAP S/4HANA Private Cloud: -

With this option, the SAP customer will have their own SAP S/4HANA application and platform hosted on the secure private cloud, without sharing with another customer. The private cloud option is fundamentally an on-premise edition of SAP S/4HANA, which is completely managed by sap. The version updates must be approved by the customer. This Cloud option is also known as SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud. You can also run the on-premise on various big cloud providers like Amazon Web Service, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure in an Infrastructure as a Service environment.

SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud: -

SAP offers Software as a Service, with this option your implementation time and efforts get reduced. It is completely hosted and managed by SAP. Presently, SAP is offering for only a few and limited industries like Manufacturing industries, Finance, Professional Services, and Marketing. When compared to the on-premise option, the SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud costs are manageable, but the security of your organization’s data is in the hand of the SAP.

Since you will run on a shared system, you are not able to modify software according to your requirements. SAP also offers the SAP HANA Cloud Platform that supports the most end to end business processes.

SAP S/4HANA Hybrid: -

It is the combination of both Sap S/4Hana private and Public Cloud deployment option. Companies who opt for this option can manage some core enterprise areas (sensitive data) on on-premise and the remaining enterprise areas (less sensitive data) can be managed by your cloud provider. Infrastructure as a Service and Platform as a Service is the two SAP S/4HANA hybrid cloud options. This approach helps the businesses to reduce their IT resources. This is the most practical option for the larger organization.

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