Questions To Ask Before Moving your SAP environment to the Cloud

As enterprises move to more interconnected environments and, basically, rely more on third party for basic services, protecting critical data has become more complex and more challenging than ever before.

SAP customers are now presenting with more options to move their environments to third party providers. This is done to either cut costs, or increase performance where it has lacked before.

One of the ‘newish’ providers of SAP cloud services is SAP, itself. With the introduction ( and rapid growth ) of the SAP Cloud Platform, SAP is an option for enterprises seeking the benefits of utilizing a cloud environment.

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Understand how the cloud provide both secures your application and the data within the application. It is import to understand that security ‘access’ to applications is different than securing the data itself.

You should expect to retain end-to-end, lifecycle control over how your data flows and how it is physically stored. When data is created, there should be a customer-controlled system for capturing the content. During the midlife of the content, controls are needed to capture the edits and changes made by various authorized users. And at the end of the lifecycle, controls are needed to ensure that the content is properly archived or wiped (destroyed).

Be sure you know how your cloud provider responds to security incidents. While some cloud providers might not provide incident response services, you may be able to acquire these services from a third party, including a different cloud provider.
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Ideally the cloud applications should integrate to backend systems via a VPN application. The communication between the cloud and backend needs to be, both authenticated and encrypted.

SAP has an advantage over other provides in that it provides the SAP Cloud Connector. The SAP CC is a VPN application which securely connects backend SAP systems to the SAP Cloud Platform. It is able to do this without openning ports in existing firewalls.
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Be cognizant of that fact that cloud provides do have physical locations where your data is stored. ( No they are not really floating in the sky ! ). If you are concerned with privacy laws in specific locations, make sure that your provider allows you to host your applications in specific geographic locations,.
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If you would like more information on moving your on premise applications to the cloud, please contact us.

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