Most SAP systems still run because people know where the sharp edges are. They know which jobs cannot be rescheduled, or which interfaces fail if latency changes. For years, those edges were hidden inside owned data centers. Cloud migration has a way of dragging them into the light. CIOs don’t talk much about this phase. On paper, the move looks easy with clean architecture diagrams and transparent provider commitments. Then behavior changes. Costs behave differently and performance shifts at odd hours. Something that never mattered before suddenly does. This is where assumptions get tested.
Protera has spent most of its life in that moment. Founded in 1998, long before cloud migration became a default strategy, the company built its work around SAP environments that were already business-critical and fragile in strange ways.
Early migrations taught that moving SAP was never just about infrastructure. Practically, it was about revealing how systems had evolved around genuine work. Over time, organizations had built habits into their platforms. Those habits did not migrate cleanly.
What CIOs often discover is that the riskiest parts of a system are not the ones everyone talks about. They are the ones everyone assumes will behave. For instance, batch jobs timed for old hardware and interfaces written to tolerate specific delays. Protera’s work tends to start before anything moves. Teams look for behaviors: how systems respond under load, where dependencies hide, and which processes break when timing changes. It is slow work. It is also the work that prevents reputational damage later.
After migration, another reality sets in.
Cloud does not stabilize SAP environments. It exposes them to continuous change. Pricing fluctuates. Performance tuning never really ends. Security and patching stop being periodic exercises and become ongoing obligations. The organization shifts from “project complete” to “system in motion”. This is where many CIOs reassess support models.
Owning infrastructure used to mean owning certainty. Cloud replaces that with flexibility, but only if operations keep up. Without a clear operating model, environments drift. Costs surprise. Incidents recur in different forms. Firefighting returns, just with new tooling. Protera’s role extends into that phase. Managed SAP services, optimization, and application support are not presented as add-ons, but as continuations of the same responsibility. Keep the system predictable while everything around it changes. Leadership at Protera frames the work in those terms.
“SAP systems don’t stop being critical once they move to the cloud. If anything, they become more exposed. The organizations that do well are the ones that treat cloud as an operational shift, not a finish line.” — Mike BeDell, CEO
That perspective resonates with CIOs who have lived through stalled transformations. The technology choice rarely causes failure. The operating assumptions do. Enterprises are modernizing SAP landscapes across AWS, Azure, and hybrid environments, and the pressure to move faster is expected to increase. What changes is whether leaders accept instability as the cost of speed, or invest early in understanding how their systems actually behave. Protera’s work suggests a clear conclusion. Cloud doesn’t simplify SAP, it reveals it, and for CIOs, revelation is often way more useful than reassurance.