Is it worth moving SAP HANA into the cloud?

Centiq has revealed details of its advice service to help organisations determine whether its in their organisation's best interest to move their SAP HANA deployment to the cloud.

The company's Cloud Readiness service comprises several steps, including workload readiness, architectural design, cost benefit analysis and an implementation plan to help businesses make an informed decision.

“Deploying complex in-memory applications on the cloud sounds too good to be true, because, often, it is," Centiq’s director of technology and services, Robin Webster, said.

"When using Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) or Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings, the basic operating system and hardware alone is nowhere near enough to provide enterprise levels of resilience and availability. A full landscape design and provisioning exercise is still imperative.”

The service takes companies through each step of the decision process, using their specific data loads as a way to measure whether hosting SAP HANA on public cloud services such as Microsoft Azure or Amazon EC2 will bring benefits.

It will also analyse non-standard cloud services the business may require, including snapshotting, data replication and high availability, making it a completely bespoke service.

“Typical HANA on Suite implementations are three to four terabytes, so the new public cloud offerings are right in the sweet spot," Webster added.

"They only make sense though if all the numbers line up, Centiq’s HANA experts help under-pressure IT departments, who need to relentlessly deliver results, to resist buying more hardware, de-risking moves to take important decisions around future IT strategies,” he concluded.