There are several things to consider when choosing a cloud hosting provider for SAP Business One. With a number of options available, it is important to consider which aspects are the most important to your business but remember that not all provide the same level of service and commitment to quality and innovation. Here are a few things to consider.
1. CostCost is usually the first thing that businesses consider, and all purchases need a good business case, but looking at price as the ‘most important’ factor can result in the wrong business choice if other aspects aren’t taken into consideration. One of the great benefits of cloud is its subscription payment model, as well as metered charging, which means that you only pay for what you use. It is important to work with a partner who can provide transparency over what you are paying for, but also realise that the choice of partner is not as simple as just choosing the ‘cheapest’ option. When hosting essential SAP solutions in the cloud, you need to be confident in the partner’s expertise with the solution and cloud platform to ensure the smoothest transition as well as ongoing support.
- Reliability
You need to be confident in the reliability and uptime of your chosen provider when you’re hosting your essential business systems in the cloud. It barely needs saying that the business cost of unplanned downtime of your customer’s SAP solution can be significant, so reliability is of the utmost importance. AWS’s SLA of 99.995% uptime is reassuring and their investment into the stability of their platform should give confidence to customers hosting their critical systems on an AWS platform.
- Security
Cybersecurity challenges are becoming ever more daunting with the risk of an attack crippling essential business systems. As more systems and applications move to the cloud, which users can access via multiple devices from any location, the perimeter has evolved to wherever each user is. This inevitably increases the attack vector for any business. It is essential that your cloud provider places security at the heart of everything they do by using the most advanced anti-virus software and two-factor authentication to minimise risk. These are very important questions to ask of your cloud provider.
- Performance
As the world leader in cloud technology, customers can be assured that their SAP solutions will be hosted on the most performant storage and compute technology with unparalleled performance. With ongoing and substantial investment into innovation and performance, AWS is the ideal platform for SAP solutions.
- Innovation
AWS has always been known for innovation and is the leader in getting new ideas and innovations to the market quickly. Some would say that AWS is already a year or two ahead of its competition, meaning that their technology could have been released, run its lifecycle, and retired by the time it gets to other cloud providers. Selecting the right cloud platform should be an essential part of your customer’s IT road map to support their business growth into the future.
- Open API
Open API means that developers all over the world are coding using publicly available application programming interfaces, which speeds up and adds additional innovation and provides technologies that customers can integrate with Public Cloud. AWS has the most partners within their ecosystem, which is important if you want to have access to third-party capabilities.
- Automation
Automation is fundamental to the speed and quality of the build for an SAP Business One cloud instance. It removes the potential for human error and provides repeatable and reliable processes for the build and maintenance of the SAP Business One cloud platform. It also offers the agility to do things quicker, meaning that customers experience a faster resolution to issues such as the requirement for a system refresh, backup restore or to patch a system. Automation facilitates agility and innovation, which helps to make businesses more competitive and set them up for future success.
- Trust
While all the above are extremely important considerations, finding a cloud hosting provider you can trust is essential for a mutually beneficial and successful long-term partnership. Does your chosen partner have certified experts in cloud technology? Do they know what they’re talking about when it comes to SAP Business One and its complementary add-on solutions? What measures do they put in place to ensure the security of their platform? What is their customer retention record like, and what SLAs do they commit to?
As an SAP Gold Partner with certified experts in both AWS and SAP solutions, Cloud4Partners™ has been providing its cloud platform for SAP Business One partners since its inception. Our highly qualified technical team has many years’ experience in these solutions and places the utmost importance on the security of our platform, as well as customer support and working with our partners to create long-term, successful relationships. To find out more about how we work with our partners, please contact our friendly team now.