This blog is the fourth in a series dedicated to exploring the role of SAP’s Business Technology Platform (BTP) from an Enterprise Architect’s perspective.
The first blog in this series, titled “Introduction: The Enterprise Architect’s Mandate in a Rapidly Evolving IT Landscape”, set the stage for this series by giving an overview of how BTP impacts the dimensions of EA.
The second entry, titled, “How SAP BTP Empowers Business Capabilities & Drives Value Across the Enterprise”, introduced concepts of BTP in the context of Business Architecture.
The third blog, titled, “Modernizing and Extending SAP Applications with BTP: Future-Proofing Your SAP Application Investments”, reviewed how BTP enables application developers with tools that can be used to build and deploy modern, cloud-native applications and extensions that complement your SAP and enterprise application landscapes.
This blog explores the concepts of BTP’s impact on infrastructure and the enterprise cloud landscape and technology architecture.
The Enterprise Architect’s Role in SAP Infrastructure Strategy
In today’s enterprise IT landscape, scalability, performance, and security are no longer optional. These are foundational requirements. Enterprise Architects (EAs) must ensure that SAP environments not only support current business operations but also remain resilient, scalable, and future-ready as organizations grow and adopt new technologies.
For organizations running SAP S/4HANA, ECC, Ariba, SuccessFactors, Concur, and other SAP solutions, SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) serves as the infrastructure backbone that connects, extends, and optimizes SAP workloads.
SAP BTP enables:
- Elastic scalability with cloud-native technologies to adapt to changing workloads
- Seamless integration between on-premise SAP landscapes and cloud-based solutions (inclusive of SAP and non-SAP platforms)
- A secure, enterprise-grade foundation for application development and deployment.
- Robust and flexible data services that encompass a large variety of data types and formats, while retaining the business-centric data semantics
- Operational efficiency through centralized provisioning and management, enabling enterprise governance, security and spend management.
This blog will explore how SAP BTP supports enterprise-scale infrastructure architecture, focusing on:
- Provisioning, managing, and securing SAP infrastructure
- Cloud scalability and performance optimization
- How BTP interacts with SAP’s other infrastructure components
Cloud-Native Scalability: How SAP BTP is Built for Growth
Traditional, on-premise SAP environments often struggle to scale due to hardware limitations, static resource allocation, and manual management overhead. Modern cloud solutions have a range of features and capabilities that address these concerns. EAs have largely embraced these capabilities in their enterprise applications through SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, and other investments in their portfolios. BTP similarly embraces these cloud-native capabilities, enabling an infastructure that dynamically scales with demand.
Key Benefits of Cloud Scalability in BTP
- Elastic Resource Allocation: Scale compute and storage resources up or down automatically based on workload needs.
- Multi-Cloud Flexibility: Deploy on SAP’s cloud, hyperscalers (AWS, Azure, GCP, etc.), or hybrid environments.
- Global Reach with Low Latency: Optimize performance with geographically distributed cloud regions.
- Reslience, High Availability, and Disaster Recovery: Minimize downtime with built-in redundancy and automated failover mechanisms.
Example: Scaling SAP Workloads with BTP
- A retail company running inventory checks in BTP experiences a seasonal holiday surge. SAP BTP automatically scales resources to accommodate increased transactions and order processing. Once demand stabilizes, BTP scales back down, optimizing costs without manual intervention.
SAP BTP provides cloud-native elasticity, ensuring enterprises can scale SAP workloads efficiently without overprovisioning resources.
How SAP BTP Interacts with Other SAP Infrastructure Components
SAP BTP as a platform does not act in a vacuum. It works alongside an organization’s existing SAP and non-SAP environments to create a unified infrastructure.
Key Infrastructure Interactions
- SAP HANA Cloud: BTP provides high-performance, scalable data storage for a variety of use cases, including analytics, AI, and real-time reporting.
- SAP Integration Suite: BTP enables secure data flow between SAP and non-SAP systems in a variety of different integration styles (API, pub-sub, EDI, bulk data loads, etc). It also supports distributed operation in private cloud or on-premises landscape via its Edge Integration Cell feature.
- SAP AI Core & SAP AI Services: BTP houses machine learning components and connectivty to Large Language Models (LLM’s) in partner hyperscalers to enhance processes for automation and optimized decision making.
Example: Hybrid SAP Landscape with BTP
- A manufacturing company runs SAP ECC on-premise but wants AI-powered predictive maintenance. Instead of modifying ECC, they deploy AI models on SAP BTP, pulling real-time equipment data via SAP Integration Suite. AI-generated insights trigger proactive maintenance alerts, along with recommended maintenance procedures, reducing unexpected downtime.
BTP seamlessly integrates with SAP’s broader infrastructure, powering new capabilities while preserving system integrity and continuity.
Infrastructure Provisioning & Management in SAP BTP
Managing enterprise infrastructure requires efficiency, automation, and governance. These are particularly important in cloud environments, where runaway processes and redundant data can add unnecessary cost to the monthly bill for consumption. As with many of its hyperscaler counterparts, SAP BTP simplifies infrastructure operations through a variety of key capabilities:
Key Capabilities for Provisioning & Management
BTP Account Model: BTP Subaccounts & Global Account management allows the enterprise to organize infrastructure resources and services by business unit, geography, or project.
- Example: A multinational corporation creates separate BTP subaccounts for North America, EMEA, and APAC, ensuring regional compliance.
Multi-Cloud Deployment Options, mentioned previously, enable the enterprise to deploy BTP services on SAP Cloud, AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud (GCP).
- Example: A financial services company runs SAP HANA Cloud on AWS while leveraging SAP AI Core on Azure.
DevOps: Administrators can build Infrastructure as Code (IaC) capabilities to automate provisioning using Terraform, BTP Command Line Interface (CLI), and Cloud Foundry APIs.
- Example: A DevOps team automates the setup of BTP environments, reducing manual deployment errors.
BTP provides centralized, flexible, and automated infrastructure management, reducing operational complexity. It’s critically important that this topic is addressed up front in adoption of BTP as a platform. Most every BTP engagement that Mindset Consulting undertakes with a client starts with a BTP Strategy, Enablement, and Governance component, which prepares the client’s BTP implementation for success in managing these considerations.
Security & Compliance: Protecting Enterprise SAP Workloads
As with any other cloud system (well, any enterprise system, really) SAP environments in the cloud must address critical capabilities around security and compliance. BTP incorporates enterprise-grade security measures to protect your mission-critical applications, data, and integrations.
Security Capabilities in SAP BTP
Identity & Access Management (IAM) with SAP Cloud Identity Services
- Identify Authentication, Provisioning, Directory and Authorization Management
- Enables Single Sign-On (SSO) across SAP and non-SAP applications
- Granular role-based access control (RBAC) to prevent unauthorized access
Data Encryption & Secure Connectivity
- End-to-end encryption for data in transit and at rest
- SAP Cloud Connector ensures secure communication between on-prem and cloud SAP applications
Compliance with Industry Standards
- BTP services and the underlying infrastructure hold a variety of certifications and attestations. Many details can be found in the SAP Trust Center.
- Supports GDPR, SOC 2, ISO 27001, and other regulatory requirements
Example: Secure Hybrid SAP Deployment
- A healthcare provider stores patient records in an on-prem SAP HANA database. To enable AI-driven patient insights, data is securely streamed to SAP BTP AI Core using encrypted APIs. IAM policies restrict AI access to authorized users only, ensuring compliance with HIPAA regulations.
BTP ensures that SAP environments are built and operated to meet the highest security and compliance standards, providing the protection your enterprise data needs.
Performance Optimization & Cost Efficiency
Infrastructure costs can spiral out of control if not optimized. Unintentional use of services or running processes can consume cloud capacity (and rack up shocking monthly invoices). To help protect your environment, SAP BTP provides tools to monitor, optimize, and reduce cloud spending while maintaining high performance.
Performance & Cost Optimization Strategies in BTP
Auto-Scaling & Pay-As-You-Go Pricing
- Automatically scale resources based on actual usage to avoid overprovisioning. Also, you can leverage Pay-As-You-Go pricing or enterprise agreements to align costs that realize only what you consume – avoiding expensive over-provisioniing. There’s even a Free Tier for most BTP services that enable organizations to try services and assess value before committing to an implementation.
Observability & Monitoring with SAP Cloud ALM
- Provides real-time performance insights to detect bottlenecks and optimize resource allocation.
Example: Cost-Optimized SAP Analytics
- A logistics company runs heavy SAP Analytics Cloud reports on HANA Cloud. Auto-scaling dynamically adjusts computing power during peak reporting times. Cloud cost optimizations reduce database expenses by 30% annually.
BTP helps organizations balance performance and cost, ensuring infrastructure investments remain efficient and scalable.
Conclusion: SAP BTP is the Foundation of Scalable, Secure SAP Infrastructure
For Enterprise Architects, SAP BTP is a key enabler of a dynamic enterpirse infrastructure for SAP workloads, providing many of the efficiencies and protections of what we’ve come to expect of modern cloud systems.
✔ Cloud-native scalability for handling evolving business demands
✔ Seamless integration with SAP and third-party systems
✔ Centralized infrastructure provisioning and automated management
✔ Enterprise-grade security and compliance
✔ Cost-effective performance optimization strategies
With SAP BTP, EAs can design solutions that can scale with confidence, secure their data and workloads, and reliably grow into the future along with their broader SAP landscape.
Next Up in the Series:
“Managing Data & Analytics at Enterprise Scale with SAP BTP”
How SAP BTP powers real-time data insights, AI-driven analytics, and multi-cloud data strategies
Stay tuned!
