{"id":10567,"date":"2018-05-24T16:12:16","date_gmt":"2018-05-24T23:12:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/?p=10567"},"modified":"2023-06-15T14:51:55","modified_gmt":"2023-06-15T21:51:55","slug":"streamlining-business-processes-with-sap-connectors-and-azure-services","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/streamlining-business-processes-with-sap-connectors-and-azure-services\/","title":{"rendered":"Streamlining business processes with SAP connectors and Azure services"},"content":{"rendered":"
This content has been archived, and while it was correct at time of publication, it may no longer be accurate or reflect the current situation at Microsoft.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Moving to the cloud is a foundation for digital transformation\u2014especially when taking advantage of the cloud\u2019s PaaS and SaaS capabilities. At Microsoft, we had already migrated our SAP infrastructure to Azure; our next challenge was to promote native connectivity between SAP and Azure. To do so, we designed the SAP Web Services Platform and the SAP ABAP SDK for Azure to provide an unprecedented level of functionality and insight into our business processes.<\/p>\n
Today, enterprises recognize the importance of adopting the cloud as part of their digital transformation. But to fully embrace this transformation, the cloud can\u2019t be solely relegated to lower-value infrastructure services such as storage or backups; it must become a core aspect of every business process where it can leverage the cloud\u2019s platform as a service (PaaS) and software as a service (SaaS) capabilities.<\/p>\n
As a technical decision maker, what are you doing to extract maximum value from your cloud services? For example, do you have a Microsoft Azure cloud subscription and are any of your business-critical processes running in SAP? Do you have other business apps in Azure that would benefit from accessing data that resides in your SAP environment? How are your Azure apps accessing your SAP-based information, and what are the benefits and challenges associated with integrating these two environments?<\/p>\n
This is what we\u2019re doing at Microsoft: incrementally moving all our IT and operational infrastructure\u2014including our business-critical SAP systems\u2014onto Azure. This case study highlights the\u00a0SAP Web Services Platform\u00a0and the\u00a0SAP Advanced Business Application Programming (ABAP) software development kit (SDK) for Azure<\/a>\u00a0that we developed to integrate SAP and Azure natively. These new connectors have greatly streamlined our development efforts to integrate SAP and Azure and have made our business-critical processes more manageable. Other organizations might consider leveraging this SDK to natively connect their SAP environment to their Azure cloud or following similar steps to develop their own SAP Web Services Platform for Azure.<\/p>\n At Microsoft, as we continue our digital-transformation journey, we\u2019re exploring a variety of ways to create new business value through the intelligent cloud and intelligent edge. Fundamental to this objective is a Microsoft Core Services Engineering and Operations\u2019 (CSEO) mandate to move the entire organization to Azure. Recent milestones we\u2019ve achieved as part of this effort include\u00a0migrating our entire SAP environment to the cloud<\/a>,\u00a0driving digital transformation with modern network infrastructure, and transitioning our corporate network to be\u00a0internet- and wireless-first.<\/p>\n Migrating all our SAP infrastructure to Azure was a monumental leap forward to becoming all in the cloud, but we also wanted to achieve a tighter integration between Azure and SAP. Doing so would accelerate the digital transformation across the business by enabling internal and external partners to connect their applications to our business processes more quickly and easily than ever before. We needed to develop connectors and APIs between SAP and Azure to:<\/p>\n We approached integrating our SAP environment with Azure in two different ways:<\/p>\n Here, we discuss these two different interfaces and how they are designed to accommodate two distinct groups of developers: the web services platform is for Azure developers, and the SDK is for SAP developers. Other organizations can also utilize the Microsoft-developed SDK to connect their SAP environment to Azure or build a similar web services platform with APIs for their own environments.<\/p>\n In our old environment, internal and external partner applications that needed to access SAP from Azure had to work with a variety of different point-to-point solutions. As illustrated in Figure 1 below, this architecture was based on three different patterns to support internal, extranet, and cloud-based partner apps, and typically required middleware that involved multiple network hops to reach the data.<\/p>\n This complex environment was resource intensive because we had to support all three patterns at once. Infrastructure costs were also high, due to duplicated services required to run internal and on-premises applications vs. those hosted in the extranet. And with its dependency on middleware, security and the amount of labor required to maintain all the components were ongoing concerns.<\/p>\n This complicated mix of point-to-point solutions had evolved over several years, and we wanted to replace it with a completely new platform that would enable apps to interoperate between Azure and SAP in a consistent manner. This platform would be an end-to-end solution for our partner apps that would reduce resource costs and simplify the environment by converging three separate patterns into one. The solution also needed to be able to access Azure tools and services, such as Application Insights, API Management, Traffic Manager, and others to enhance operations.<\/p>\n To accommodate these design requirements and support our digital transformation through the intelligent cloud and intelligent edge, we built our next-generation SAP Web Services Platform for Azure using the SAP .NET Connector and deployed it to Azure as a RESTful service. As Figure 2 illustrates, this new solution is based on the enterprise hybrid connectivity (EHC) basic design pattern, utilizing Azure AD (Active Directory) and Kerberos authentication to enable access to the designated SAP system. This new interface provides a single means for partner apps to integrate with SAP no matter where they reside\u2014in Azure, an extranet, or on-premises.<\/p>\n Our new SAP Web Services Platform for Azure enables Azure developers to work with a single set of services to access all our SAP systems, including Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Master Data Governance (MDG), and Supply Chain Management (SCM) in real time. This platform reduces our infrastructure complexity and associated costs. It also has lowered our maintenance and support costs, because we\u2019re no longer supporting multiple point-to-point solutions.<\/p>\n By leveraging the power of Azure, this platform provides all the capabilities that enterprises demand of business-critical systems: high availability, efficiency, and disaster recovery. As Figure 2 illustrates, the platform lets us take advantage of the entire stack of native Azure tools\u2014something our previous on-premises-based system couldn\u2019t do. Through the platform, we can now use:<\/p>\n As part of migrating our business-critical processes to the cloud, our SAP development team needed to send data from the relevant SAP systems to Azure services, but had no efficient way to do this. At the time of this effort, no native integration mechanism existed. Although Azure supported numerous SDKs and tools for programming languages such as Java, .NET, Node JS, PHP, and Python, no SDK was available for ABAP, SAP\u2019s proprietary programming language.<\/p>\n Without an ABAP-specific SDK, our SAP developers had no out-of-the box support from SAP to consume Azure services. In addition, aside from SQL Server Storage and Azure Blob Storage, there were no readily available products that could integrate SAP to Azure cloud services. In the absence of native integration, we had to incorporate middleware solutions to shuttle data between the two environments. Our developers would then engineer their own point-to-point solutions that entailed multiple network hops through the middleware\u2014along with a lot of custom coding for:<\/p>\n Authentication.<\/strong>\u00a0As a cloud service, Azure employs sophisticated authentication and authorization procedures that are challenging to code correctly.<\/p>\n Data formatting.<\/strong>\u00a0Data formats are completely different between Azure and SAP\u2014and also differ among systems and services. For each data transmission from SAP to Azure, our developers had to custom code the correct translation between the two messaging formats, writing custom code for Azure EventHub and different custom code for Azure Key Vault.<\/p>\n Consuming the end points.\u00a0<\/strong>Azure has REST endpoints to which data should be sent. But programming this can be extremely challenging, especially for ABAP developers who had to work in an unfamiliar environment where properly coding for a single REST endpoint might require more than 1,000 lines of code.<\/p>\nDrive to integrate SAP environment with Azure<\/h2>\n
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Our platform and connectors integrate SAP and Azure<\/h2>\n
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SAP Web Services Platform for Azure: Reaching into SAP from Azure<\/h3>\n
Challenges with the old system<\/h4>\n
What we built<\/h4>\n
Benefits of using the new platform<\/h4>\n
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SAP ABAP SDK for Azure: Connecting SAP to Azure<\/h3>\n
Challenges with the old system<\/h4>\n