SAP Projects can be incredibly daunting.
If you have ever read articles about SAP implementations and projects, you have no doubt come across coverage of successes and failures. An oft-mentioned factor in the ‘failure’ articles is lack of change management. In business and technology, the impacts of the changes were not sufficiently understood, and this negatively impacted the SAP project.
If I was responsible for a successful SAP project today, I would want everyone involved (business and technology) to consistently apply these three questions:
- What must change?
- Are these changes understood and managed?
- Are these changes production-ready?
As an example, consider a project to move your SAP systems from on-premise, or another cloud, to IBM Cloud. Project teams will ask:
- What will move and connect, like for like?
- What will move with compute/storage/network changes?
- Will our security posture change?
- Will systems management change?
- Will SAP availability and data protection change?
You can quickly think of many specific questions that fall under the category of change management and quickly find yourself in search of specific answers.
It is with this search in mind that I would like to bring attention to a few recently published IBM Cloud deployment guides for SAP on Power Virtual Server, SAP on VPC, and SAP on vCenter. Together these guides provide helpful information for understanding several of the change management items you may address when moving your SAP systems onto IBM Cloud. The objective of these guides is to provide a solution design for SAP deployments to:
- Accelerate and simplify solution design of enterprise-class deployments by providing a reference deployment architecture for SAP on IBM Cloud PowerVS, VPC, and vCenter that follows the IBM Architecture Framework.
- Provide a prescriptive, end-to-end enterprise-class solution design, with diagrams and component architecture along with rationale for cloud component selection for a secure, resilient SAP deployment on IBM Cloud PowerVS, VPC, and vCenter.
- Ensure that requirements can be met from performance, system availability, and security perspectives.
I hope you find the deployment guides informative and helpful in understanding some of the possible changes to be managed when moving your SAP systems onto IBM Cloud.
#SAP
#powervirtualserver
#vpc#vmware
#vcenter