Moving Toward a Cloud Database Strategy

In many companies, business application landscapes have become very large and extremely complex over time. This scale and complexity can inhibit innovation because even a small change can have a huge impact on the entire system landscape.

These impacts may be related to the business process, requiring extensive testing of all affected systems. The change may also affect the infrastructure of the system landscape, leading to ordering additional hardware or upgrading the affected database or operating system.

All these steps are time-consuming, cost money and involve experts in specific business areas. This is the opposite of what companies expect. A move to the cloud would improve this situation in many business areas.

On-prem landscapes are often large and complex best-of-breed system landscapes. This means customized solutions for dedicated business areas. All these purpose-built solutions can't work stand-alone. They need to interact with each other to support the company’s business processes. These system landscapes often consist of hardware, operating systems, databases, and business applications of different vendors, so maintaining them takes much effort from the IT department.

Large data volumes with different formats are inherent to the best-of-breed approach. This situation arises on its own due to the use of business applications from different suppliers. These applications have all their own data formats and data stores. This makes it difficult to exchange data with applications from other vendors.

Siloed data in different locations is again inherent to the best-of-breed approach. Most business applications store their data in a database, but every business applications vendor has its preferred database type. This means that important master and transactional data like is stored in different databases and servers. It takes much effort from the IT department to keep all this data up to date and in sync over all the different locations.

Complex Infrastructures is also inherent to the best-of-breed approach because different applications support different databases, operating systems, and hardware. All these systems need to be able to interact with each other because the business application need to be able to exchange data between each other. This makes the infrastructure complex.

Data compliance is very important in today’s world. Companies have to set up procedures to ensure that sensitive data is managed and organized in such a way that business rules and legal and governmental regulations are met. Breaking these rules could lead to reputation damage (bad press) and financial damage (fines for breaking the rules).

When making the move to the cloud, all the above points must be taken into account as well! It's not like storing your data in a cloud auto-magically makes the above pain points go away. A thorough investigation into the capabilities and features of the cloud provider need to be conducted to ensure that all business requirements are met.

SAP HANA Cloud is a fully managed in-memory multitier cloud database as a service (DBaaS). As the cloud-based data foundation for SAP Business Technology Platform, SAP HANA Cloud integrates data from across the enterprise, enabling faster decisions based on live data.

SAP HANA Cloud combines several important features in one product. The following features are part of SAP HANA Cloud:

Connected Data

Memory-powered virtualization and integration for real-time performance on trusted data. All data is available on-demand, regardless of size, category, and complexity, available to you whenever you need it.

Database as a service

Managed database services that streamline operational efforts and provide the lowest TCO. Combining the known SAP HANA qualities like in-memory, multimodel, hybrid transaction, and analytic processing in real time with high volume and extreme transactional focused services.

Workload execution

In-memory-first architecture combining advanced analytics on live transactional data. Streamlined access to data that connects all your information without demanding that all data be loaded into a single storage solution.

Built-in reliability

Advanced high availability, disaster recovery, increased resilience, and autonomous behavior, and enterprise-class data security and privacy.

Data at scale

Using cloud qualities like elasticity, serverless principles, intelligent data tiering, and advanced compression for cost-effective and unlimited scale to have a low TCO.

Data-driven decisions

Multimodel and machine learning libraries creating business insights from structured and unstructured data. Easy integration with a unified access layer to simplify data processing while consolidating and harmonizing data integration to your intelligent applications.

SAP HANA Cloud also provides an integrated development environment in which the developer can develop and model custom applications.

In this lesson, you've learned which challenges companies face in today’s world and how, as one of the four pillars of the SAP BTP, SAP HANA Cloud provides the database and data management services to handle constantly growing data volumes in central place.