You probably have heard of it. There are supply chain problems that, unfortunately, also hurt the delivery time and pricing of new hardware for your own data center. Therefore, buying the required computing power from Microsoft or its competitors can be of enormous advantage.
Hyper-scalers usually have better access to the hardware manufacturers, if only because of the annual purchase quantities.
Until now, SAP customers mainly relied on external computing capacity to cover short-term or temporary requirements. And Microsoft makes the deployment of SAP systems particularly easy. Automated infrastructure and instance deployment can be realized when using Ansible. By the way, the existence of many knowledgebase pages that specifically revolve around SAP also offers great added value. Network segmentation, SAP HANA scale-ups, etc., are described in detail. See also
I am also a fan of the interface, which for me comes across as less complicated than, for example, AWS, which I have been working with for many years. Due to the global distribution of data centers, MS Azure naturally offers a suitable location for companies within the European Union, e.g., to meet GDPR requirements. However, this is not a unique selling point compared to the other providers.
What SAP customers particularly appreciate, however, is the monitoring of performance and security.
Azure offers Microsoft Sentinel, a cloud-native SIEM that can also process SAP logs. There is even a free adapter, although it is still in “preview” mode. The mere existence of this SAP adapter proves that Microsoft is taking SAP customers’ concerns into account and creating an attractive offering. In addition to security monitoring, SAP customers must, of course, also pay attention to system performance. This can be achieved with the Microsoft Azure Monitor, which can display all important metrics for SAP.