Introduction
SAP systems have always helped businesses consolidate their data and conduct data analysis to make data-driven decisions. Despite this, businesses leveraging SAP solutions tend to struggle when it comes to managing huge volumes of data. For an organization looking to lower its SAP data workloads, they can leverage modern cloud data solutions like Snowflake for a seamless SAP data migration process.
The advantages businesses can gain by streamlining SAP data workloads to Snowflake are – greater flexibility, scalability and cost efficiency. However, there are numerous complexities of moving SAP data workloads to cloud platforms. To tackle these problems, Snowflake offers a more powerful approach that can easily simplify SAP data migration challenges. Snowflake provides a unified, scalable, and cost-effective solution that helps businesses aggregate diverse data sources and get more data-driven analytics.
In this blog, we are going to discuss how businesses can leverage Snowflake to enhance the SAP data migration process and how Kasmo can support businesses in this transition, so your organization can achieve best performance and incur low costs.
Challenges Businesses Face While Migrating Their SAP Data to Cloud
Let’s look at some of the most common challenges businesses face while migrating or streamlining their SAP data to cloud:
Complexity in Data Integration and Migration
The process of SAP data migration can seem complex to many businesses. There are still several organizations that run SAP BW (Business Warehouse) systems. These systems have become deeply integrated with their daily operations. Migrating from SAP BW/4HANA can seem daunting, as it requires careful planning, reworking of data flows, and overcoming licensing and technical barriers.
For instance, the non-SAP data of businesses often resides outside the SAP ecosystem, and integrating this data with SAP’s cloud solutions can be challenging. Moreover, organizations with existing data lakes or enterprise data warehouses (EDWs) may struggle to consolidate their data in a cloud platform without disrupting business operations.
The complexity of managing diverse data sources, ensuring seamless data flow, and handling legacy system dependencies adds significant strain to the SAP data migration process.
Rigidity of Legacy Systems
SAP systems can sometimes be deemed to be unpopular due to their legacy architecture. Its on-premises solutions, such as SAP ECC (Central Component – an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system that integrates data from several areas of a business in real time) and SAP BW, were designed with fixed data architectures and batch processing methods that are not well-suited to the flexible, scalable nature of cloud environments.
As data continues to grow, businesses need to restructure data models, rework workflows, and adjust analytics tools, which makes the migration process more complex. For instance, businesses often face difficulty in moving legacy reports to cloud-native platforms. Additionally, SAP’s cloud solutions like SAP DataSphere and SAP HANA are not flexible and scalable as cloud-native alternatives. This leads businesses to rethink their existing architecture and evaluate if this architecture can handle complex, multi-source data environments efficiently.
Overhead Cost and Vendor Lock-In
The cost of SAP data migration process to cloud platforms can be substantial. The licensing costs for new systems, the need for specialized skills, and the resources required to manage the migration process can strain businesses financially. Additionally, some organizations may face vendor lock-in (a situation where a customer is entirely dependent on a single vendor and find it difficult to switch to another vendor) when using SAP cloud solutions. This leads to long-term dependencies and limited flexibility for businesses, if they plan to switch to a different cloud provider in the future.
How Snowflake Solves the SAP Data Migration Challenges
If your business has been using SAP systems, you might face challenges to scale these systems, as they’re complex, rigid and less adaptable to change. Additionally, moving SAP data to cloud platforms can make the situation worse and you might not even want to move to cloud platforms.
But Snowflake Data Cloud solves these challenges by bringing its easy-to-use, scalable and secure solution. These are some benefits of migrating or streamlining SAP data to Snowflake:
Simplifies Present Business Architecture
Integration of data, from structured to unstructured, remains one of the main challenges businesses face while migrating SAP data to cloud platforms. Snowflake addresses this issue by easily integrating data from multiple sources, including structured, unstructured and third-party data.
This platform also helps companies to consolidate their SAP data into a single platform, simplify data access and management. Snowflake’s architecture supports AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), which frees businesses from vendor lock-in. Its ability to integrate diverse data sets enables organizations to build comprehensive views facilitating better decision-making.
Provides Workload Elasticity
Businesses who are only using traditional SAP systems are often constrained by fixed storage, leading to inefficiencies and bottlenecks in their operations. Snowflake solves this problem by offering elastic compute and storage capabilities.
It allows businesses to scale their data as per the business requirement, reducing downtime and improving performance. Snowflake also helps businesses streamline SAP data workloads and SAP BW queries. Its ability to scale computational power ensures businesses that they can handle large data volumes without the need for third-party data warehouses.
Reliable Data Security
Data security is a top concern for businesses while migrating SAP data to cloud platforms. Organizations need to ensure that their sensitive SAP data remains protected. Snowflake provides built-in, end-to-end encryption for sensitive data. This eliminates the need for businesses to look for additional security measures, simplifying compliance and governance. By centralizing data in a single platform and providing a unified security model, Snowflake reduces the risks associated with data breaches and unauthorized access.
Primary Use Cases Showcasing the Benefits of SAP Data Migration to Snowflake
Replicating SAP BW Data to Snowflake
Many organizations rely on SAP BW for data warehousing. However, when it comes to scaling, flexibility, and handling complex data types, SAP BW may not be sufficient. Snowflake enables the seamless replication of SAP BW data. It assists in consolidating data from other sources—such as third-party applications.
Snowflake creates a single source of truth for all data without the need for multiple and external data warehouses. Moreover, Snowflake’s ability to elastically scale computing power ensures that large analytical queries or machine learning models run efficiently without impacting system performance.
Replacing SAP BW with Snowflake
While SAP BW offers various built-in tools for data modelling and reporting, businesses are finding it difficult to maintain the tools due to their complexity. Snowflake is a cloud-native platform that is both simple to manage and more powerful in terms of processing capabilities.
Migrating from SAP BW to Snowflake allows organizations to take advantage of Snowflake’s modern data engineering capabilities, including automated data transformations and integrations with external systems. Snowflake’s architecture ensures high performance, enabling teams to transition their workloads seamlessly.
Replacing SAP HANA Data Warehouse with Snowflake
SAP HANA lacks a scalable and flexible data warehouse. Businesses who initially implemented SAP HANA for storing their data are finding it increasingly difficult to accommodate large volumes of data. These challenges can be easily navigated by replacing SAP HANA data warehouse with Snowflake. This cloud data platform is getting increasingly popular due to its scalable and flexible data warehouse, that can be infinitely scaled with growing business data.
By replacing SAP HANA with Snowflake, organizations can take advantage of elastic compute resources, seamless data sharing across cloud platforms, and lower operational costs. Snowflake’s scalable architecture ensures that both OLTP (Online Transaction Processing) and OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) database workloads are handled efficiently.
Modernizing Reporting with Snowflake
Migrating SAP’s reporting system, such as SAP BusinessObjects, to Snowflake can help businesses unlock the full potential of their analytics. With this migration, organizations can continue using their familiar reporting tools while leveraging Snowflake’s cloud scalability and high-performance capabilities. Businesses can easily integrate Snowflake with popular BI tools like Tableau and Power BI that allows businesses to streamline their reporting infrastructure, reduce system downtimes, and improve performance.
How Kasmo Facilitates a Seamless SAP Data Migration to Snowflake
Kasmo specializes in SAP data migration to Snowflake. With deep expertise in both SAP ecosystems and Snowflake’s architecture, our experts assist businesses in overcoming the complexities of SAP-to-cloud migration.
Seamless Data Replication and Integration
Kasmo ensures that your SAP data is replicated efficiently into Snowflake without compromising your data integrity. Our team helps businesses integrate SAP data with external systems and ensures that the data is actionable and accessible to all users in the organization.
Simplifying SAP data Migration
Migrating from SAP BW or SAP HANA to Snowflake can be complex. But our experts can easily streamline this process by providing a comprehensive migration plan that includes data modeling, transformation, and validation. Kasmo always ensures that your data is fully optimized for Snowflake’s architecture.
Ensuring Performance and Scalability
Kasmo helps you leverage Snowflake’s elastic compute power to ensure that your data workloads run at optimal performance levels. Our experts work closely with your teams to design and implement scalable solutions that can meet your business needs.
Ongoing Support and Optimization
Our experts don’t just help you with the SAP data migration process, they also provide continuous support to ensure that your Snowflake environment is performing optimally. Kasmo strives to continuously assist the clients with performance tuning, cost optimization, and troubleshooting, which ensures that your organization gets the most out of Snowflake.
Training and Knowledge Transfer
We empower your team with the knowledge and skills needed to manage your Snowflake environment. Kasmo offers training sessions and hands-on support to ensure a smooth transition and successful long-term use of Snowflake.
Check out our webinar on how businesses can optimize their SAP Data Analytics on Snowflake with Kasmo!
