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SAP is an essential partner for Microsoft’s digital transformation. We use SAP to run the majority of our business operations, including mission-critical functions like finance and human resources.

Since migrating our SAP systems to Azure, we’ve fine-tuned our capacity management processes, minimizing downtime, risk, and costs and improving employee efficiencies. Optimizing on Azure allows us to design an SAP environment that is agile, efficient, and flexible to grow and change with our business.

So you’ve decided to migrate your SAP systems to Azure. It’s a big move, and taking the right steps can make the transition smooth and manageable. We took a measured approach to moving our most sensitive data and confidential workloads, spearheading over 12 months of migration processes with our own SAP systems. Microsoft’s SAP environment is 100% migrated to Azure as of February 2018, and we are the only enterprise that runs SAP on our own platform.

The right approach makes it possible to migrate mission-critical SAP systems to Azure, gaining maximum cost savings, scalability, and agility, without disrupting business operations. Our horizontal strategy meant moving low-risk environments like our sandboxes first, giving us experience with Azure migration without risking critical business functions in the process. Using a vertical strategy to move entire low-impact systems gave us experience with Azure production processes. Microsoft’s SAP landscape of 16TB of compressed data is now in the public cloud with Azure.

To make the most of migration, the cloud should not be limited to lower-value infrastructure services like storage and backups; it must become a core aspect of every business process and utilize all of the cloud’s PaaS and SaaS capabilities. It was important for us to enable internal and external partners to connect their applications to our business processes quicker and easier, so establishing native connectivity between SAP and Azure was a critical next step in our digital transformation journey.

Introducing these new connectors has streamlined our engineering efforts to integrate SAP and Azure, making our business-critical processes more manageable and providing unprecedented functionality and insight into our business.

Managing critical enterprise solutions is complex and challenging, and we recognized the importance of proactively addressing SAP security in Azure. That’s why we developed a strategy to protect SAP assets and data with Azure security solutions and SAP tools. The SAP on Azure environment is secure by design, with integrated systems, tight controls, and effective risk monitoring that work together to protect Microsoft assets and data while still staying compliant with new regulations like SOX and GDPR.

Microsoft’s security-redesign initiative relies on the enterprise-security framework and principles we have developed over time, and incorporates the Azure-specific security framework with SAP security tools. Our goal is to create an optimally integrated cloud security and compliance strategy, ultimately increasing confidence in running our enterprise’s most demanding and sensitive workload in Azure.