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.

The partnership between Google Cloud and SAP is entering a new chapter. Over the years, our close partnership with SAP and our mutual dedication to customers has inspired us to do some of our most unique and innovative work—such as building Fast Restart and Memory Poisoning Recovery capabilities for S/4HANA workloads, offering real-time access to our advanced machine learning (ML) capabilities, and developing integrations with the industry’s best cloud security and network infrastructure.

With an expanded, strategic partnership, we are capitalizing on one of the cloud’s most valuable benefits: enabling customer choice without driving up cost or complexity. Customers have shared that they appreciate what Google Cloud has done over the years to support their ability to choose—from our support for multi-cloud environments to our track record with open-source technologies like Kubernetes, to name a couple of examples. 

“We chose Google Cloud to support our SAP implementation. Our decision had a lot to do with the relationship between Google Cloud and SAP and also for the applications and services that are offered by Google Cloud, like BigQuery, which are helping to enable data and analytics within our organization.”— Sam Moses, Vice President of Corporate Systems, The Home Depot

Now, we’re placing this same emphasis on customer choice, flexibility, and freedom to help SAP customers get greater ROI from their cloud investments in three ways:

• Execute seamless business transformations that deliver all of the benefits of modern, cloud-native applications and services—quickly, economically, and without disrupting day-to-day operations
• Migrate critical business systems to the cloud, in order to lock in OpEx savings and refocus their IT teams on strategic business technology initiatives
• Augment existing business systems with cloud capabilities in AI, ML, and analytics

The cornerstone of our expanded partnership is the RISE with SAP program—a comprehensive set of tools, technology, and expert support for a fast, predictable, cost-effective path to business transformation with SAP in the cloud. RISE is also designed to meet every SAP customer on their own terms, whether they’re undertaking an enterprise-wide cloud migration or pursuing an incremental or hybrid-cloud approach. 

To support customers taking advantage of RISE with SAP, Google Cloud will work even more closely with SAP to accelerate customers’ cloud migrations and business process modernization across several key areas. This includes ensuring global availability of multiple SAP services and products—such as SAP Business Technology Platform and SAP HANA Cloud—on Google Cloud’s reliable, scalable infrastructure and high-speed network. Google Cloud is also committed to bringing SAP’s solution for RPA in manufacturing to the Google Cloud Marketplace to support business process modernization. 

Additionally, integrating our AI, ML, and analytics capabilities with key SAP solutions will help companies augment their business systems with sophisticated capabilities and technologies so they can draw more value out of the data stored with them.

“We can deliver our 160 key business insights two or three orders of magnitude faster with BigQuery. When you think about our marketing campaigns and month-end finance processes, we’re talking about jobs that used to take five to eight hours to complete that are now running in seconds.”— Dan Semmens, Head of Data and AI, ATB Financial

Join us on the journey ahead

There’s so much more to come from SAP and Google Cloud. Learn more about our commitment to enabling digital transformation and hear more from customers about their SAP on Google Cloud deployments.

Editor’s note: Today’s post highlights five takeaways from our session at the first ever Google Cloud Public Sector Summit. To watch the full session, check out All the Right Moves: Prioritizing Investments in Technology.

Now more than ever, government agencies need to invest in digital services to fulfill their missions and better serve communities. Yet modernization isn’t a one-and-done approach; it’s a sustained effort, with multi-year implications, and requires careful consideration of how to integrate existing investments to optimize costs. Digital transformation requires coordination between different programs and agencies, including all of their many competing considerations. In short, maximizing technology investments requires careful planning, strategic thinking, and industry partners that can provide flexibility and security and meet agencies where they are. 

I sat down with Suzette Kent, former U.S. federal chief information officer, and Dominic Sale, assistant commissioner for Technology Transformation Services at the General Services Administration (GSA) for a conversation to unpack this important topic and discuss industry best practices. 

The panelists had five tips for government employees who are making technology purchasing decisions for their agency.

1.   Put the agency’s mission first.Avoid getting distracted by exciting new trends and focus on long-term goals that can impact which procurement strategies or funds could be used. The discussion started with how government agencies could cut through the noise about technology and prioritize which technology is best for their needs. Sale and Kent agreed that an agency should focus on its core mission outcomes and let its technology needs flow from that. Sale also emphasized the importance of having technology design respond to humans’ needs, which has historically been a challenge for government agencies.

For agencies to stay focused on their mission, final decisions about technology need to be made by the program manager who best understands each program’s mission. The government CIO’s role is to be the enabler for the technology and leverage it at the enterprise level, particularly when it comes to sharing infrastructure.  The takeaway: enable mission programs by empowering your teams and providing access to authorized, compliant, innovative data platforms that programs can move confidently and quickly with.

2.   Invest in interoperability. Agency employees often struggle to balance the need for a positive return on investment (ROI) with requirements for meeting mission objectives. While the panelists agreed that the total cost of ownership was important, they also emphasized taking an expanded view of ROI, including future-proofing and investing in functionality that may not realize its return for many years based on the initiative. Saving money isn’t particularly valuable if the solution doesn’t meet an agency’s needs. When choosing a technology partner, government employees should understand its long-term vision to ensure that the partner fits agency priorities. Partners’ technologies should also integrate seamlessly with existing systems so agencies don’t duplicate investment costs.

For example, Google Anthos extends Google Cloud services and engineering practices into an organization’s existing environment, establishing operational consistency across apps and modernization. With Anthos, agencies can simply and securely build and deploy applications anywhere, integrating cloud services across platforms. This allows them to enjoy a consistent DevOps experience for hybrid and multi-cloud environments and enables new innovation. Most importantly, this enables an enterprise data platform, one of the largest catalysts for mission transformation and applied AI.

3.   Take advantage of artificial intelligence (AI) benefits. Over the course of the pandemic, the rapid application of AI has improved government productivity, efficiency, and the ability to deliver critical new services to the public at scale. This has further cemented AI’s role as an essential government technology for the present and future. In fact, Nextgov reports that “46% of government IT specialists plan to use AI and machine learning (ML) for embedded systems in the near future.”

As we’ve seen over the course of the pandemic, government programs can start small with AI  pilots before moving into broad deployment. This can help agencies understand AI’s potential before moving to full production. People always supervise AI technologies, and the possibilities are endless. Google Cloud’s Contact Center AI (CCAI) has helped government agencies improve the customer experience, by allowing citizens to schedule vaccine appointments via a platform of their choice with up to 28 languages and dialects, and manage vaccine deployment. The U.S. Navy spends billions annually to fight rust and corrosion on its ships. Inspections of ships, aircraft and vehicles are a time-consuming and critical part of keeping the U.S. Navy at top performance so Google Cloud and Simple Technology Solutions (STS) rapidly built an AI-based corrosion-detection and analysis system. The system detected and analyzed corrosion on vessels with 90% accuracy and will eventually be used to automate inspections of vessels, aircraft, and vehicles—saving billions of dollars. Document AI helps a variety of government agencies scale their document processing, reducing the time it typically takes to process enormous amounts of data and related citizen claims.

Successful adoption of AI also depends on the quality of the data. Ultimately, agencies need high-quality enterprise data pipes so that employees and the community trust the system and public sector agencies. Sale described a GSA project that used AI bots to read legal contracts and look for particular phrases that would indicate a specific use case. Previously, an employee would have had to read through the contracts and search for the information. In this way, AI is saving the government both money and time.

4.   Creating better experiences for the public. Sale observed that, “trust is the government’s currency and profit motive.” And trust comes when the public can be served with the same modern tools and technology they’re used to – in real-time and with transparency in mind. For example, agencies can provide transparency in public-facing dashboards for programs and supply services that deliver information in real-time through solutions like CCAI.

Trust also requires that constituents feel that government agencies will keep their data safe and secure. The need for a globally secure infrastructure with systems that are up-to-date and designed with security at every level, underpinned by zero-trust enterprise-wide remains paramount – particularly after the series of recent cyberattacks targeting government IT infrastructure.

5.   Finding the right technology partner. Government leaders need technology partners who  provide a flexible and interoperable platform to integrate existing investments and maximize technical value. Historically, public sector agencies have largely been forced to adopt private clouds, which has reduced their access to richer features, and hindered their ability to adopt a full range of security and product capabilities. The right partner won’t require government leaders to compromise on functionality or service availability to achieve compliance. The right partner can harness the power of emerging technology to make it Government-ready and the true promise of cloud– the access and integration of open data– to make missions more powerful and impactful for the constituencies they serve.

There are multiple reasons a growing number of database administrators, enterprise architects, application developers and other technology practitioners are moving to Google Cloud’s various database services.

Some are being driven by missing features in offering from other providers such as AWS. In Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Operational Database Management Systems, the research and advisory firm points out that, “AWS’s surveyed reference customers scored its overall product capabilities one standard deviation (STD) below the mean. Their responses identified missing features such as multiregion writes and autosharding.”

Others are moving to database services on Google Cloud Platform driven by a few benefits. According to Gartner, “Reference customers repeatedly commented on Google’s ease of use and implementation, reliability and integration (with other services and other systems). Reference customers scored Google a full STD above the mean for satisfaction with GCP’s pricing; it received the second-highest satisfaction score of any vendor in this Magic Quadrant.

If you are looking to leverage the power of Google Cloud database offerings—but were unsure of which database services comes closest to the service you are currently using, here’s a handy map to find your way.

When we launched Partner Advantage, we committed to making it predictable and easy for partners to drive business with us. Since launch, those commitments have been validated by channel experts like CRN, which gave Partner Advantage a 5-Star award for 2022, and by the fact that our partners have seen impressive growth* across virtually every facet of their business.

I am pleased to announce that our commitments endure today with the launch of Consumption Packs for Deal Acceleration Funds and Partner Services Funds (DAF and PSF for partners). Inspired by partner feedback, these new packages are designed to accelerate all stages of a customer’s journey to the cloud, and make it even easier and faster for partners to do business with us.

Consumption Packs are purpose-built so that partners can plan and initiate customer projects much more quickly, with predictable funding. They include assets and templates that allow partners to deliver Google Cloud designed and validated infrastructure, application migration and modernization plans to customers faster than ever–particularly for customers beginning their journey to the cloud. Based on learnings gathered from thousands of customer deployments, these turnkey packs have been designed by our partners and Google Cloud Partner Engineering and Professional Services’ teams.

Here’s a brief look at Consumption Packs in action:

• Consumption Packs offer pre-approved, curated templates and assets to simplify and shorten the process for most common projects.
• For Deal Acceleration Funds (DAF), packages include everything partners need to conduct assessments, workshops and proofs-of-concept so they can quickly meet customers where they are on their journey to the cloud.
• For Partner Services Funds (PSF), packages are structured so that partners can develop cloud ready foundation and migration plans that align with Google Cloud priority solution areas.
• Packages have pre-determined funding levels to enable faster deployments.

Partners still have the option to engage with Google Cloud Partner Advantage and their customers through customized requests, as they always have. This is ideally suited for projects that require a tailored approach to meet unique customer requirements.

We are launching nine consumption packs today focused on key enterprise workloads, with a vision toward introducing additional packages to cover more solutions. Partners can explore Consumption Packs now by visiting the Partner Advantage portal.

We welcome your continued feedback and suggestions, and look forward to helping our customers achieve new levels of growth and success, together.

See you in the cloud.

• The Google Cloud Business Opportunity For Partners, a commissioned Total Economic Impact™ study conducted by Forrester Consulting, October 2021