SAP Data Center

SAP Data Center

Always-on, fast, global, secure, compliant — these qualities are now table stakes with respect to software applications. No company can survive today without meeting these criteria.

Yet, the increasingly complex infrastructure ranging from legacy mainframes, modern distributed servers, hybrid data storage, and private/public cloud, has become a challenge for IT teams to manage. More and more companies rely on expert-managed data centers to keep their systems and data operating, available, and secure.

The management of infrastructure — whether co-located on the company’s premises, remotely managed, or fully outsourced data centers, as well as private and public cloud — now require tremendous expertise of specialized data center operators. With their scale and expertise, operators are able to meet the service-level agreements (SLAs) of their clients with respect to availability, performance, and costs.

The Advantages of SAP Data Centers

SAP also manages and provides its data centers in several regional locations around the world, including Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, Oceania, and South America. The wide choice of locations is important to meet requirements such as GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation 2016/679) and other country-specific regulations which may require customer data to reside within country borders.

SAP data centers are built and run according to industry standards for power, cooling, redundancy, backups, and physical and cyber security. SAP also operates a second data center in the region of the primary data center to handle disaster recovery.

Many companies are also committing to energy efficiency. Hence, SAP data centers have also invested in green energy and energy efficient infrastructure to help its customers meet their sustainability goals.

SAP Data Centers as the Basis for Cloud Computing

SAP data centers not only provide computing power for its customers, but also run SAP’s own cloud portfolio with more than 80 cloud services. Different solutions are offered based on customer need, including virtualization, multi-tenancy, adaptive, and edge computing. Most large customers end up using a hybrid approach based on their application portfolio.

According to SAPinsider’s own research, SAP workloads are moving to the cloud at an increasing rate: 88% of SAPinsiders are running at least some of their SAP workloads in a private, public, or hybrid cloud environment. “Of the 12% who are running all their SAP workloads on internal infrastructure, or in a managed environment on-premise, nearly two-thirds say that they plan to move those workloads to the cloud within two years,” writes Robert Holland, Vice President and Research Director at SAPinsider.

SAP customers have an increasing choice of data center and cloud providers. CIOs must assess based on key criteria to build a solid infrastructure foundation to meet business needs.