Three reasons to peer SAP-managed apps with your Google Cloud services
Jesper Christensen
Partner Development Manager, SAP
Over the past year, RISE with SAP has emerged as a valuable solution for SAP customers seeking a faster, simpler, and more affordable path to the cloud. RISE with SAP is a subscription-based offering that typically includes a number of fully managed cloud application options, including SAP S/4HANA Cloud and elements of the SAP Business Technology Platform. It's a great way to migrate your business to modern cloud ERP applications, while handing off the implementation and management to SAP and freeing your own IT staff to focus on other projects.
As a strategic partner for RISE with SAP, Google Cloud works closely with SAP to ensure reliable, secure, high-performance connectivity between your SAP managed applications and your other Google Cloud applications and services. Today, we're focusing on a Google Cloud capability that plays a big part in achieving this goal: VPC network peering. If your company uses Google Cloud to host its RISE with SAP managed applications (or any other SAP-managed offering, such as SAP Enterprise Cloud Services), it's worth learning more about why VPC network peering is an important capability and how your network admin can implement it.
VPC network peering: The critical link for your SAP managed applications
We recently co-authored a white paper with SAP that goes into technical detail about how VPC network peering works and includes step-by-step configuration instructions. But it is useful to understand, at a higher level, why it matters for RISE with SAP subscribers.
When SAP implements your RISE with SAP managed applications on Google Cloud, it also provisions a virtual private cloud (VPC) — a virtualized network that provides the same functionality, performance, and security benefits as a dedicated physical network — for this SAP environment. In fact, a VPC actually gives you some capabilities that a physical network can't match, such as the ability to increase IP space without downtime.
Using VPC network peering to connect your SAP managed environment with your Google Cloud applications and services gives you three key benefits:
Network latency: Traffic that remains inside Google's network enjoys lower latency than connectivity that uses external addresses.
Network security: Service owners do not need to have their services exposed to the public internet and deal with its associated risks.
Network cost: Rather than pay egress bandwidth costs for networks using external IPs to communicate, peered networks can use internal IPs to communicate, saving you money on those egress costs. Regular network pricing still applies to all traffic.
Many customers also appreciate the flexibility they get from VPC network peering: It supports the ability to peer your own VPC networks with other VPC networks that reside in different projects and even in different organizations.
Using VPC network peering to strengthen your SAP security posture
Most Google Cloud customers find VPC network peering most useful to ensure seamless connectivity between their SAP managed applications and the rest of their Google Cloud environment. But some companies also rely on VPC network peering to gain greater control over the security of their cloud environments. This can include:
Implementing additional network security capabilities, such as advanced firewalls, intrusion detection, and network package inspection, that go above and beyond standard SAP security measures.
Leveraging Google Cloud Interconnect to link your on-premises and Google Cloud environments, including your RISE with SAP managed applications, without sending traffic across the public internet.
Once your company has configured VPC network peering, things get even more interesting. Google Cloud offers plenty of ways to complement and enhance the value of your SAP applications: using Google BigQuery to consolidate and enrich your SAP application data; relying on Google AI/ML capabilities to sharpen your predictive analytics and real-time decision-making; or leveraging Google Kubernetes Engine to jump-start your own cloud-native application development efforts, among many other examples.
Some of the world's biggest SAP customers, including The Home Depot, and Cardinal Health, have chosen Google Cloud to migrate their business-critical SAP applications. And we've seen how useful VPC network peering can be for SAP customers to unlock the full value and potential of Google Cloud. Be sure to download our white paper so you can get VPC network peering configured for your RISE with SAP managed applications, and discover for yourself just what's possible when you run SAP applications on Google Cloud.
