Migrating from SAP to Snowflake
THE BENEFITS OF OFFLOADING SAP DATA INTO SNOWFLAKE
The Snowflake platform provides a simple
and elastic alternative for SAP customers that simultaneously ensures an organization’s critical information is protected. Snowflake was built from scratch to run in the cloud — whether it’s Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), or a combination of all three. This frees companies from cloud provider lock-in and provides the following benefits:
• Architectural simplicity: Snowflake improves the ease of use of SAP with greater architectural simplicity. The first benefit Snowflake offers SAP customers is making data accessible and actionable by putting it all in the same place. This enables companies to follow the FAIR principles (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable) as defined in Wikipedia.
Snowflake provides a solution that is cloud provider agnostic and that can ingest data from SAP operations systems (both on-premises and cloud), third-party systems, and signal data. Snowflake also robustly ingests the data — whether it’s in structured or semi-structured formats or even if the data structure in the
files changes. Gravitational centering of data provides a foundation for customers to build 360-degree views of customers, products, and the supply chain.
This includes interweaving data sets from business partners and Snowflake Data Marketplace through sharing.
Snowflake manages storage automatically in terms of capacity, compression, statistics, and performance. This eliminates the need for customers to build indexes or do housekeeping. Snowflake provides computational power that is elastic and isolated from other compute clusters used by other teams. This translates into data citizens being able to focus more of their time on tasks that add value to a company’s top and bottom line.
In addition, Snowflake seamlessly streamlines the use of SAP data (in combination with
other data sources) to enable trusted relevant business content to be accessible to all users. It is designed to handle the full volume, velocity, and variety of data. Users can load data and create reports at the same time. Snowflake also offers a system that has virtually no downtime — no four-hour window every week for upgrades and no system shutdown to increase or decrease compute.
• Convenient workload elasticity: Snowflake offers scalability to attach and detach computational services as needed. This delivers convenience, operational efficiency, and cost savings. Splitting compute from storage allows both to scale independently and elastically — leveraging the cloud providers’ hardware and compute, without having to deal with their complexity and quirks.
With Snowflake, users just open a view of their data and others can mix it with their own data. They can start with 20 GB and grow to more than 20 PB and back down again. The amount of computational power organizations use scales in seconds and is isolated. For example, this means no more throttling of SAP BW queries and no more license negotiations because SAP HANA is throwing out-of-memory errors.
• Reliable data security: With Snowflake, simplicity also means data security. All data is always encrypted — in storage or in transit — as a built-in feature of the platform. Data is landed once and views are shared out. This means one copy, one security model, and hundreds of elastic compute clusters with monitors on each one of them. Within the same account, users also have their test, development, and production environments. For local markets (instead of using FTP to transfer their data between systems),
users simply open access for approximately 200 views to corporate, and their reporting is done. There is no latency, no auditing, and only one governance.
By alleviating the problems of complexity and rigidity while at the same time ensuring cloud data protection, Snowflake solves four of the most critical SAP workloads for businesses today:
• Replicating SAP BW data
• Replacing SAP BW
• Replacing SAP HANA data warehouse
• Keeping SAP BusinessObjects and SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) but replacing the source
Reach us at https://s2integrators.com/contact-us/ or email to sales@s2integrators.com
