We are very excited to be part of Sapphire 2024 this year as a diamond sponsor to “bring out the best in customer'sbusiness” with SAP on Azure. We help customers get the most out of their current SAP investments, improve their operations significantly, and make them more agile and innovative. We also continue to build a robust portfolio of services to deploy, manage and extend and innovate customers’ SAP workload leveraging AI and Copilots to unlock insight and automation. Our comprehensive analytics platform on the Microsoft Cloud enables customers to extract more insights from their SAP and non-SAP data. Also, our unified security operations platform, powered by industry-leading AI, enables faster response to security threats and leverages the Microsoft Intelligent data platform to deploy machine learning models more efficiently and cost-effectively.
With these expanded capabilities more and more customers are choosing SAP on Azure as their preferred cloud provider, with the possibility of running RISE with SAP and natively with SAP solutions.
When South32, a global mining and metals company, spun off from BHP, it needed an environment to build scalable and easy to manage SAP systems. RISE with SAP on Azure offered a transformation solution that minimizes risk and no trade-offs for migrating its legacy systems.
“RISE with SAP on Azure and SAP’s Private Cloud Edition remove the infrastructure-level management activities and present us with a simple service catalogue–based approach for managing our application activities.”
- Stuart Munday, Group Manager, ERP, South32
For Kyndryl, it was important to have a platform that meets the diverse needs of its customers as it moved away from its legacy infrastructure after separating from IBM. To build a new reliable, secure and agile SAP platform, Kyndryl decided to deploy a greenfield solution on SAP on Azure leveraging the built-in functionality to simplify operations and improve efficiency.
" The ease of the rollouts of Microsoft 365 and our SAP on Azure solution, along with how easily interoperable they are, gave us confidence in our ability to drive sweeping, positive change.”
- Guido Reisch, Vice President of Enterprise Applications, Kyndryl
Building upon the momentum, we are happy to share product updates to further help our customers improve productivity and business outcomes in the era of AI.
- Automatic attack disruption for SAP with Microsoft Sentinel for SAP and Microsoft Defender for Endpoint to protect SAP hosts.
- Replacing SAP Identity and Access Management (IDM) with Entra ID. Furthermore, supporting MFA for SAPGUI using SAP Secure Login Service and Entra ID to mitigate sign-in risks for every SAP interface.
- Public Preview of SAP OData Connector in Microsoft Power Automate and General Availability of OData capability in Azure API Management enabling customers and partners to quickly and securely connect to SAP OData services for Copilot Studio scenarios like “chatting with your sales orders” and more.
- Integration of the API Management capability in SAP Integration Suite with Azure API Management. This boosts discoverability of Azure APIs for the SAP BTP developer persona.
- Preview for Mv3 High Memory and General Availability of Mv3 Medium Memory and Mv3 Very High Memory series to provide faster insights, more uptime, and improved price-performance.
- Azure Center for SAP solutions now has quality checks for Db2 and Oracle databases as well as integrated VM health annotations in Quality Insights.
- Enhanced the provider and alert management experience for Azure Monitor for SAP solutions by simplifying the creation and monitoring of the Providers and creating a new central alert management experience.
- The SAP Deployment Automation Framework is extended to supportHANA Scale-outand integration of Azure Monitor for SAP into the deployment workflow.
- Private Preview of SAP ASE (Sybase) database backup support on Azure Backup.
- Public preview of Discovery and Assessment of SAP Systems in Azure Migrate to perform assessments of on-premises SAP inventory and workloads.
- General Availability of Well-Architected Framework for SAP as part of Azure Center for SAP Tools and Frameworks to provide best practices to optimize SAP deployments.
With that let’s get into the summary of product updates and services.
Extend and Innovate
Microsoft Sentinel Solution for SAP
Business applications pose a unique security challenge with highly sensitive information that can make them prime targets for attacks. Microsoft offers best in class security solutions support for SAP business applications with Microsoft Sentinel.
We are announcing automatic attack disruption for SAP. Correlating signals from Microsoft Defender XDR with Sentinel for SAP ensures the confidence to take drastic action like isolating devices, disabling Entra ID users, and the SAP backend user. A less disruptive approach with semi-automatic disruption using approvals via Microsoft Teams is available too. See this video to learn more.
We also recently announced the General Availability of Copilot for Security. It easily analyzes incidents involving SAP, generating threat hunting queries, summarizing impact for the leadership, and recommending remediation steps. See this video to learn more.
Furthermore, we are announcing additional detections for SAP AS JAVA. Update your Sentinel for SAP solution or simply browse the content hub to get them. The solution provides threat detection for SAP workloads running on Azure, in RISE, other clouds and on-premises.
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint for SAP applications
We are announcing new deployment guidance to protect SAP hosts with industry leading Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) and next generation Antivirus. Deployment guidance validated with SAP workloads is available for Linux and Windows based SAP systems.
MFA for and SAP IDM Replacement
Conditional access and multi-factor authentication are the first line of defense against cyber-attacks on SAP systems. Protection of SAP Web applications like Fiori launchpad with Entra ID is already a common practice. Before it was not possible to use MFA for the power user experience with SAPGUI. Learn more about how to extend MFA and conditional access to SAPGUI using SAP Cloud Identity Service and Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure AD) in this blog.
SAP and Microsoft signed contracts to intensify collaboration in the identity space. SAP IDM will be replaced by Entra ID and SAP Identity Access Governance will be tighter integrated with Entra ID Governance.
Power Platform
Customers on or moving to SAP S/4HANA are recommended to follow a “keep the core clean” approach. The idea is to develop extensions outside of the ECC or S/4HANA core system. Using Microsoft's low-code Power Platform customers follow exactly this paradigm which enables them to easily build extensions of their SAP system without modifying the core. In an easy and quick way business users and low-code developers can enhance the SAP system, integrate in Microsoft 365 and many other solutions and build new Applications like Creating Purchase Orders using Power Apps, automate processes like invoice processing using Power Automate or even build Chatbot Copilots that allow you to query the latest status of a Sales Order using Copilot Studio.
So far it has been possible to connect to SAP RFC and BAPIs using the SAP ERP Connector. While we are constantly enhancing this connector, for example, Simplified Single Sign-On Support via Kerberos, customers have also asked for a connector to SAP OData Services.
The new SAP OData Connector now in Public Preview enables customers and partners to quickly connect to SAP OData services. It also integrates with API Management solutions (like Azure API Management, or SAP API Management) to control access to your SAP system.
Try out and get started with the SAP OData Connector.
API Management
We are sharing integration guidance for SAP API Management (part of SAP Integration Suite) and Azure API Center to govern all API gateways within an enterprise. Many customers use at least two integration platforms today. API Sprawl is a major driver for increased API security risks and “Improper Inventory Management” is part of the OWASP API security top 10 list. Learn more from this blog post.
Furthermore, we announced the integration of the API Management capability in SAP Integration Suite with Azure API Management. See this blog from SAP to learn more.
New SAP Certified Compute and Storage
Thousands of organizations today trust the Azure M-Series virtual machines to run some of their largest mission-critical SAP workloads, including SAP HANA.
Azure M-series Mv3 Family
The next generation memory optimized virtual machines, give customers faster insights, more uptime, a lower total cost of ownership and improved price-performance for running SAP HANA with Azure IaaS deployments and SAP RISE on Azure. Our new Mv3 VMs, supporting up to 32 TB of memory, are powered by the 4th generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors and Azure Boost, one of Azure’s latest infrastructure innovations. The Mv3 family provides unparalleled computational performance to support large in-memory databases and workloads, with a high memory-to-CPU ratio that is ideal for relational database servers, large caches, and in-memory analytics. Mv3 has three virtual machines series, Medium Memory (MM), High Memory (HM), and Very High Memory (VHM). Today we are pleased to share that Preview for Mv3 HM series has been ongoing, and Mv3 MM and Mv3 VHMseries areGenerally Available.
Mv3 Key Features and Benefits:
- Mv3 delivers quicker insights and faster performance over Mv2, enabling up to 30% faster SAP HANA data load times for SAP OLAP workloads and up to 15% higher performance per core for SAP OLTP workloads over the previous generation Mv2.
- Powered by Azure Boost, Mv3 provides up to two times more throughput to Azure premium SSD storage and up to 25% improvement in network throughput over Mv2, with more deterministic performance.
- Mv3 has been built from the ground up with a significant investment in stability and reliability. It offers improved resilience against common failures in memory, storage, and networking, resulting in minimized interruptions to your mission-critical workloads.
- Using 16-socket hardware to host our 32TB VMs on gives customers the assurance of having enough CPU resources for even the most demanding S/4HANA systems.
Mv3 is available in many regions with zonal resiliency. All Mv3 virtual machine sizes can use Premium SSD v2, as well as Premium SSD v1 and Ultra SSD.
SAP on Azure Software Products and Services
Azure Center for SAP solutions
Azure Center for SAP solutions (ACSS) is an end-to-end solution to deploy and manage your SAP landscapes on Azure. ACSS is now available in 7 additional regions for a total 27 Azure regions. Now even more customers can take advantage of the rich management capabilities either themselves or through partners.
At SoftwareONE, integrating our customers’ SAP systems with ACSS has become standard practice. ACSS offersour teams and customers a centralized location to view status and vital information about their SAP estate.Through ACSS, we have increased our visibility of key SAP information, can performmass actions on SAP systems such as start/stop, and check configuration of the systems against evolving Azure deployment best practices. We collaborate closely with Microsoft to enhance and further leverage ACSS as a powerful tool for managing SAP workloads on Azure
- Chris Kernaghan, Chief Product Owner (SAP Services), SoftwareONE
We are also happy to announce some of the new capabilities that are now available for you to use in ACSS. You can deploy new S/4HANA systems using the latest Mv3 virtual machine SKU for HANA database. Mv3 offers improved performance, better reliability with reduced TCO. To ensure your SAP systems on IBM Db2 and Oracle databases are running per best practices, after you register your SAP systems with ACSS you can take advantage of the expanded quality checks based on Azure Advisor Recommendations which now cover checks specific to IBM Db2 and Oracle database.
Apart from the Advisor recommendations, Quality Insights in ACSS provides an end-to-end availability and performance metrics view for all Virtual Machines of the SAP system along with Azure Resource Health VM annotations. When you are troubleshooting issues with availability or performance, these metrics at SID level help you quickly identify if the issue is due to an Azure infrastructure health event or not.
In addition, you can now improve security by limiting access to the managed storage accounts deployed by ACSS to only trusted virtual networks.
Please check out the product documentation to learn more or head over to the Azure Portal to try out the new features.
Azure Monitor for SAP solutions
Azure Monitor for SAP solutions is a cloud-based monitoring solution that helps you monitor and optimize the performance and availability of your SAP applications running on Azure. We are excited to share a few of the latest announcements for Azure Monitor for SAP solutions.
We have simplified providers creation by automating some of the steps for SAP NetWeaver, Operating System, and High-Availability providers, making it easier and faster to onboard your SAP systems to Azure Monitor for SAP solutions.
You can now more efficiently monitor the telemetry data flows properly from your SAP systems to Azure Monitor for SAP solutions through the recently added provider level health details.
We have improved the alerts experience in Azure Monitor for SAP solutions by providing a centralized view of all the alerts generated by your SAP systems, databases, hosts, and infrastructure. You can also perform bulk operations on the alerts, such as acknowledging, enabling/disabling, multiple alerts at once.
Azure monitor for SAP solutions has been expanded to 7 more regions, making it available in 30 regionsnow.
SAP Deployment Automation Framework
The SAP Deployment Automation Framework (SDAF) helps our customers rapidly deploy SAP S/4HANA and SAP NetWeaver at scale. The latest release of the SDAF introduces a suite of enhancements that significantly improve the deployment of SAP systems on Azure. This release introducesHANA Scale-outwith worker/standby nodes utilizing Azure NetApp Files storage, fortifying the framework's scalability and resilience. The integration ofAzure Monitor for SAP solutions enabled deployment of our first-party monitoring solution.
We also added a post deploymentplaybookto allow customers to apply custom configuration to further tailoring the deployment to their specific needs. Additionally, support for SystemD-based SAP Startup frameworkfor SLES, and encrypted DB2 databases is now available.
“By using the SAP Deployment Automation Framework, we have significantly sped up the deployment of our customers' SAP applications on Azure. By rigorously adhering to recommended architecture and industry best practices, we’ve been able to streamline the modernization of SAP infrastructure on Azure, translating into significant cost reductions and heightened operational efficiency for our clients.
Jose A Hernandez, CTO, myCloudDoor
To learn more, please check out our product documentation.
Azure Backup for SAP
Since introducing Azure Backup for SAP HANA, we have extended the range of capabilities to increase backup performance and extend backup to other database workloads. We recently launched Private Preview of SAP ASE database backup support on Azure. SAP ASE Backup enables customers to schedule backups, retain those backups for longer periods and perform on demand ad-hoc backups. Customers can also restore ASE DBs to specific points in time using log backups or revert to a designated recovery point. ASE backups are streamed directly to a Recovery Services Vault, ensuring complete isolation of backup data from the production environment and enhanced protection.
We also continue to invest to make HANA backup faster and more cost-effective. We recently announced support for multi-streaming/multi-channel backup, which increased the backup throughputs from 420 MBps to ~1.5 GBps and reduced the time to back up a 1TB HANA database to less than 20 minutes. We also enabled support for HANA native compression on Azure Backup along with instant HANA snapshot backup, allowing users to achieve a significant reduction of 40-45% in storage usage, thereby lowering backup cost.
Discovery and Assessment of SAP Systems with Azure Migrate
We are announcing the public preview of Discovery and Assessment of SAP Systems in Azure Migrate. Using this capability, customers can now perform import-based assessments for their on-premises SAP inventory and workloads. With a simple excel based discovery of your SAP system inventory, you will be able to see the SAP landscape in Azure migrate. You can then run multiple assessments to understand the deployments on Azure to meet your business needs with performance optimized and cost optimized recommendations for the various environments in your SAP estate on Azure.
Azure Center for SAP solutions Tools and Framework
Central to our dedication to simplifying SAP migrations and operations on Azure lies the Azure Center for SAP Solutions Tools and Frameworks. In continuation with the efforts, we are delighted to announce the general availability of the Well-Architected Framework for SAP, bolstered by Microsoft Assessments. The Well-Architected Framework for SAP on Azure provides a comprehensive set of best practices to optimize SAP deployments in the cloud. It emphasizes five key pillars: cost management, operational excellence, performance efficiency, reliability, and security. By adhering to these principles, organizations can ensure robust, scalable, and efficient SAP environments on Azure.
Azure Inventory Checks for SAP represents a health check tool designed to offer our customers and partners a comprehensive overview of their SAP deployment quality at a subscription level. We are thrilled to introduce a feature update for Inventory Checks in SAP, offering invaluable insights into the utilization of Azure NetApp files. Customers gain the ability to track volume activity against predefined threshold values, empowering them to adjust settings accordingly.
SAP + Microsoft Co-Innovations
Microsoft and SAP have been partners and customers of each other for over 30 years, collaborating on innovative business solutions and helping thousands of joint customers accelerate their business transformation. The Microsoft Cloud is the market leader for running SAP workloads in the cloud, including RISE with SAP, and today at SAP Sapphire 2024, we are very excited to bring more amazing innovation to the market for our joint customers. Be sure tocheck out our blogto stay up-to-date on these important announcements.
