SAP on Alibaba Cloud: Performance and Compliance for Successful SAP Projects in Asia

Addressing Performance and Localization challenges

“The main advantage for Chinese customers is access to a local infrastructure that delivers significantly better performance because their SAP ERP systems are hosted directly in Asia,” explains Bruno Sommariva.

Until recently, organizations seeking to host their SAP systems in China typically relied on global hyperscalers such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), or Google Cloud, often with higher infrastructure costs.

Beyond performance considerations, the SAP-Alibaba Cloud partnership also addresses increasingly important regulatory requirements.

“Some organizations are required to host all or part of their information systems in China or other Asian countries to comply with local regulations,” says Sommariva.

Thanks to its team of SAP and cloud experts based in China, oXya has helped many customers address these challenges. One example involved a European company that was required to replicate a database in China on a weekly basis for audit purposes.

“We designed an architecture allowing a Europe-based system to be replicated regularly to China while meeting both operational and compliance requirements,” he explains.

Best Practices for a Successful SAP Deployment on Alibaba Cloud

As with any hyperscale cloud provider, running SAP workloads on Alibaba Cloud requires adherence to strict prerequisites.

SAP and Alibaba Cloud provide detailed implementation guidelines, particularly regarding compute resources and storage.

“It is mandatory to use SAP-certified virtual machines provided through ECS (Elastic Compute Service), along with specific types of storage, as not all are SAP-certified,” explains Sommariva.

For example, Alibaba Cloud’s Object Storage Service (OSS) is commonly recommended for SAP HANA database backups.

Security is another critical area of focus at oXya.

“We strongly recommend that our clients encrypt all their data end-to-end ” says Sommariva.

This approach, now considered an industry best practice, ensures that even if storage disks are compromised, data remains completely inaccessible without the appropriate decryption keys.

“With modern technologies, we no longer face performance issues related to encryption,” he adds, addressing one of the most common questions raised by clients.

oXya Expertise Supporting SAP Cloud Transformation

With a presence in China since 2013 and a team of around twenty professionals based in Shanghai, oXya has developed extensive expertise on Alibaba Cloud.

The company employs certified experts in both France and China and has successfully delivered numerous projects on the platform, including SAP landscapes as well as other business-critical applications.

“Everything we deploy on these cloud platforms, is coded using Infrastructure as Code (IaC), rather than manually ” explains Sommariva.

Over the past two years, oXya has developed a dedicated Alibaba Cloud deployment stack capable of automating the deployment of both simple and complex architectures while ensuring high availability across application and database layers.

oXya’s support extends well beyond technical implementation.

“We also take a FinOps approach, helping customers understand and optimize the cost of their Alibaba Cloud projects,” says Sommariva.

While Alibaba Cloud infrastructure is often more cost-effective than other hyperscalers, the network component between end users and systems hosted in China remains a non-negligible expense.

Looking Beyond ERP: SAP BTP and AI Opportunities

The SAP-Alibaba Cloud partnership goes far beyond ERP hosting.

With support for SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) and other solutions such as SAP Integrated Business Planning (SAP IBP), organizations can build end-to-end SAP architectures on Alibaba Cloud.

oXya’s SAP BTP specialists can support customers design and deploy these solutions across Asia.

Artificial Intelligence is also becoming a major area of collaboration between SAP and Alibaba Cloud, with both companies expanding the integration of AI capabilities across the SAP ecosystem.

For international organizations seeking to diversify their cloud infrastructure strategy while strengthening their presence in Asia, Alibaba Cloud represents a credible and increasingly strategic alternative. Combining local performance, regulatory compliance, and advanced cloud services, the platform is becoming an important enabler for SAP transformation initiatives throughout the region.