UK IT leaders plan to migrate SAP apps to the cloud in the next two years

Research released today from managed services provider Ensono reveals that 79 percent of UK IT leaders plan to migrate their SAP applications to the public cloud within the next two years.

While the majority of SAP applications are still housed on-premise, 70 percent of those responsible for SAP believe migrating to the public cloud will be more beneficial than keeping it in-house. In fact, 61 percent state that migrating SAP to public cloud is critical for their business success.

Almost 20 percent of those surveyed had one or more SAP applications already hosted on public cloud. Benefits of migrating SAP are cited as improving operational efficiency and performance (59 percent), delivering a better customer experience (51 percent), cost savings (33 percent) and improving compliance and regulation (30 percent).

In addition, 16 percent of respondents feel migrating to public cloud will address the needs of business leaders, showing an appetite and involvement from business leaders with SAP often a mission critical part of the business. This is especially true where operations have had to focus on digital due to changing requirements brought on by the pandemic.

As well as business drivers the report identifies technology benefits too. Migrating SAP to Azure will allow businesses to take advantage of IoT (44 percent), offer security advantages (37 percent), to take advantage of AI and ML (33 percent), integrate with other workloads (29 percent), extra scalability (28 percent), reduce complexity (23 percent), access data lakes outside of the SAP ecosystem (21 percent), and prepare for SAP S/4 HANA migration (17 percent).

Sean Roberts, general manager, public cloud at Ensono says, "SAP is the lifeblood of many businesses and represents the center of gravity within the IT estate. As organizations mature in their cloud journey, many are facing a fundamental question; to continue to invest and renew their SAP hardware and software assets where they are or make a strategic shift and move these to the public cloud."

Despite all this, however, 27 percent of those surveyed still feel it would create more issues to migrate to public cloud than it would fix. And while many feel SAP migration to the public cloud is critical for longer term success, one in four are struggling to define a clear migration path. One in six also confirm there is uncertainty or issues regarding integration with legacy SAP applications and fear the time it will take to migrate. When asked about barriers to migration 58 percent sayCOVID-19 has changed the agenda, 43 percent point to security concerns, and 23 percent cite issues around Brexit.

The full report is available from the Ensono site.

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