How to Understand SAP’s Cloud Upcharge on AWS Storage

ByShaun Snapp

Executive Summary

  • SAP is marking up AWS storage.
  • In this article, we provide a specific example of the upcharge and the percentage.

Introduction

SAP’s strategy of charging AWS, GCP, Azure, and private cloud providers like HPE give customers an excellent reason never to use the SAP Cloud (which we refer to as SAP Cloud UaaS or Upcharge as a Service).

Our References for This Article

If you want to see our references for this article and other related Brightwork articles, see this link.

Notice of Lack of Financial Bias: We have no financial ties to SAP or any other entity mentioned in this article.

  • This is published by a research entity, not some lowbrow entity that is part of the SAP ecosystem. 
  • Second, no one paid for this article to be written, and it is not pretending to inform you while being rigged to sell you software or consulting services. Unlike nearly every other article you will find from Google on this topic, it has had no input from any company's marketing or sales department. As you are reading this article, consider how rare this is. The vast majority of information on the Internet on SAP is provided by SAP, which is filled with false claims and sleazy consulting companies and SAP consultants who will tell any lie for personal benefit. Furthermore, SAP pays off all IT analysts -- who have the same concern for accuracy as SAP. Not one of these entities will disclose their pro-SAP financial bias to their readers. 

The Storage Example

AWS sells storage in Europe/Frankfurt for $2.3 per 100 GB/month. SAP resells the same storage block in the same region for $7.86. That’s a 342% premium. Storing 1 TB on AWS costs $276/year. The same 1 TB on SAP using AWS as a provider in the same region costs $943/year.

See the following screenshot.


Go to top

Conclusion

This is consistent across all of AWS services when they are activated through SAP’s UaaS. This is why the SAP Cloud UaaS is so dangerous. SAP’s strategy is to markup the cloud infrastructure of other providers while doing very little work itself.