The new offerings include Rise with SAP and options to use a hybrid approach for regulated and non-regulated industries.

IBM is offering a new service to help SAP customers move workloads and applications from on-premise data centers to the cloud. The companies announced Thursday that IBM will be a premium supplier for Rise with SAP. Also, consulting services will be available to help SAP customers move to SAP S/4Hana Cloud.

According to research sponsored by the companies, organizations that move to SAP S/4Hana on IBM Cloud see higher revenue, lower costs and increased productivity. IBM has invested in Rise with SAP and is a premium supplier for that service. IBM’s Hybrid Cloud will support the performance, availability and security of deployments of private editions of SAP S/4Hana Cloud.

John Granger, senior vice president, IBM Consulting, said in a press release that this new project expands the partnership between the two companies.

“Our shared commitment is to meet our clients, especially those in highly regulated industries, where they are in their digital journey, while giving them choices for migrating or modernizing their mission critical workloads with a hybrid cloud approach,” Granger said.

Brian Duffy, president of cloud, SAP, said in a press release that Breakthrough with IBM combined with Rise with SAP lays the foundation for companies starting or expanding business transformation projects.

“It reaffirms the value customers recognize from Rise with SAP and the impact and innovation opportunity Rise with SAP offers to organizations that move to the cloud,” Duffy said. “The combined expertise and experience SAP and IBM offer will accelerate cloud adoption and business growth for customers across the globe.”

Rise with SAP is a SAP S/4Hana Software as a service cloud-based subscription product designed to move existing SAP ERP systems to S/4Hana.

IBM and SAP have worked with Coca-Cola European Partners, Parle Products, Harmont & Blaine, Puravankara Ltd and Virgin Megastore KSA to modernize systems and business processes.

As Mary Shacklett explains in “Housing your big data in the cloud: Multicloud, hybrid cloud or on-premises? How to decide,” IT leaders have to consider the tradeoffs between on-prem data centers and cloud infrastructure. The cloud offers scalability, potentially improved security and no local infrastructure to support. If data is stored on-prem, the ability to access and query this data is faster. If the cloud is the preferred choice, the next decision is private, public or hybrid. These are some of the decisions SAP customers have to make when moving to the cloud.

According to a recent survey from migration software provider Archive360, some of the issues IT leaders have to consider when moving workloads to the cloud include:

• Concerns over regulations and compliance, including global privacy regulations
• Worries about infrastructure and security
• Uncertainty about the budget requirements for cloud adoption, including the total cost of ownership and return on investment
• The volume and complexity of the data to be migrated, such as structured versus unstructured data
• The lack of technical resources and/or talent required to perform the migration
• The lack of complete ownership and control of data in the cloud
• Questions surrounding cloud information management