SAP HANA Cloud vs. SAP HANA on-premise

SAP HANA was introduced in 2010 and at that time it was available only as an on-premise platform. The customer would provision their own hardware and would install the SAP HANA software themselves or with a partner. The customer would take care of the day-to-day running and on-going maintenance and upgrades.

In 2020 SAP launched SAP HANA Cloud which provides an easier to deploy version of SAP HANA. SAP HANA Cloud is run by SAP and its cloud partners who take care of all aspects of the operations of the platform. Customers simply consume the services of the SAP HANA Cloud.

Compared to SAP HANA on-premise, SAP HANA Cloud receives more frequent updates. There is a new release of SAP HANA Cloud every quarter when new features are added.

Caution

Do not confuse SAP HANA Cloud with SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud (HEC). The latter is a private cloud deployment of SAP HANA on-premise and is not shared but is used only by one customer who has complete control over it. SAP HANA Cloud is a public cloud service shared by many customers who are its tenants.

Some tools that were introduced for SAP HANA on-premise are also used with SAP HANA Cloud:

• SAP HANA Cockpit - for monitoring and administration tasks.
• SAP HANA Database Explorer - for exploring the database and executing SQL statements.
• SAP HANA Web IDE - application development, can still be used but this is replaced with Business Application Studio.

Tools that were introduced for SAP HANA Cloud:

• Business Application Studio - application development, replaces SAP HANA Web IDE.

SAP HANA Cloud compares very closely with SAP HANA on-premise in terms of features but there are some differences.

Because SAP HANA Cloud is a provisioned service, most system and database configuration settings that are available in SAP HANA on-premise are not visible to the customer in SAP HANA Cloud.

Many customers combine SAP HANA on-premise with SAP HANA Cloud to create a hybrid landscape. This means they take advantage of the new innovations delivered with SAP HANA Cloud with the stability of SAP HANA on-premise for their mission-critical applications. SAP HANA on-premise (officially called SAP HANA) and SAP HANA Cloud are incredibly easy to integrate into a hybrid landscape.