Get ready to migrate your SAP, Windows and VMware workloads in 2021

This year, we’ve witnessed tremendous change not only to our daily lives, but also how businesses work. For us, part of that meant helping businesses migrate and modernize their most important enterprise workloads—think SAP, Windows, and VMware—to Google Cloud, helping them achieve scale, flexibility and cost savings. Let’s take a quick look back on the progress we made this year and what’s to come.

SAP on Google Cloud delivers agility

An SAP environment is often at the very center of an enterprise’s operations. From financial accounting to supply chain management to human capital management, SAP applications demand the highest levels of flexibility, security and uptime. Customers considering migrating SAP to the cloud are looking to improve their business continuity capabilities. They need a secure cloud with advanced reliability, network, and uptime performance. They excel with data analytics and machine learning capabilities. And they want a cloud migration free of the drama and disruptions that usually accompany enterprise software projects. 

In June 2020, Forrester assessed SAP on Google Cloud and found exciting results for customers considering a migration:

• Companies that adopt SAP on Google Cloud save more than $3 million per year on average by eliminating hardware purchases, optimizing their software licenses, and streamlining their IT staff, and through other operational efficiencies.

• Migrating SAP environments to Google Cloud effectively eliminated customers’ concerns about system uptime, and they saved $1.5 million per year on average by avoiding downtime issues.

• Google Cloud dramatically reduced the impact of server bottlenecks, infrastructure failures, network capacity issues, and other performance issues, resulting in $500,000 in productivity gains on average for each SAP on Google Cloud user.

Mileage will vary on these kinds of benefits. But a clear story emerged from these studies: Adopting SAP on Google Cloud has proven to be an investment that pays itself back quickly.

Reduce your Microsoft and Windows license costs

Many companies didn’t choose to become “Windows shops” but find themselves relying on Microsoft platforms as a result of years of growth, acquisitions, and change. Long-time Microsoft users are often eager to reduce their licensing costs, avoid lock-in, and to make better use of open standards and open-source software—and ensure that their investments in Windows Server applications are a matter of choice. 

Google Cloud offers an opinionated path to migrating and modernizing Microsoft workloads. Over the past year, we’ve invested heavily in providing first-class experiences for Windows Server and other Microsoft platforms like SQL Server and .NET on Google Cloud. Here are some of the highlights you may have missed: 

• The Enterprise Strategy Group quantified the benefits of moving Microsoft workloads to Google Cloud.

• IDC found Google Cloud proves to be an ideal platform for Windows Server-based applications.

• We introduced ways to help you reduce license costs with CPU Overcommit, migrate off of Windows Server 2008, and run Windows containers in GKE.

• We launched features to make it easier to manage Windows Server VMs on Google Cloud. 

• We also launched managed SQL Server and managed Active Directory services.

• Google Cloud announced a new partner-first solution for Virtual Desktops to get remote workers back to work

Google Cloud VMware Engine makes cloud success seamless

Every enterprise is striving to adopt a cloud-first strategy—but making that happen is easier said than done. Google Cloud VMware Engine bypasses the challenges of moving and modernizing critical workloads to the cloud, letting you seamlessly migrate your VMware workloads from on-premises data centers directly into Google Cloud.

Google Cloud VMware Engine became generally available in the US in June. Since then, we rapidly expanded availability to eight regions across the Americas, Europe, and Asia Pacific, with more on tap for next year. We also saw significant adoption from enterprises in industries including Retail, Finance, Healthcare and Life Sciences, and increased demand for Virtual Desktop solutions (VDI) for workers who quickly started working from home. 

We also forged partnerships with data protection and DR players to enable you to move to the cloud with ease. Google Cloud VMware Engine is integrated with Actifio, Zerto, Veeam, NetApp, Dell Technologies and others, helping you utilize the same data protection technologies you use on-prem, in Google Cloud, without having to change your applications. 

It only gets better from here

Looking forward to 2021, we’re committed to meet every organization wherever it is on its cloud journey, with a wide range of dedicated services, infrastructure, and tools to simplify the process. Our migration capabilities recently took another big step forward with the Google Cloud Rapid Assessment & Migration Program (RAMP). It’s a holistic, end-to-end migration program with an even bigger array of tools, incentives, and offers to help you plan and carry out a successful migration. No matter what your business has been through this year, here's to 2021 being all that you hope it will be!