During our recent webinar: 'UNFILTERED and Hands-on: The cost of not moving to the Cloud', our panel of experts unpacked the often invisible costs that come with delaying your SAP modernisation. But we discovered that this isn’t just a ‘go Cloud or go home’ scenario. SAP customers are under growing pressure to modernise, innovate, and do more with less. Modernisation isn’t a one-size-fits-all journey, and it certainly doesn’t always mean moving everything to the Cloud overnight.
When it comes to your SAP landscape, change can feel daunting, but not making a decision can come at a cost, too.
That was the premise behind our recent webinar, UNFILTERED & Hands-on: The cost of not moving to the Cloud, where our panel of experts unpacked the tangible, strategic, and often invisible costs that come with delaying your SAP modernisation.
But here’s the thing that we discovered: this isn’t just a ‘go Cloud or go home’ scenario… SAP customers are under growing pressure to modernise, innovate, and do more with less. Modernisation isn’t a one-size-fits-all journey, and it certainly doesn’t always mean moving everything to the Cloud overnight.
There are valid, and often strategic, reasons why some organisations choose to remain on-premises. And that’s okay. What matters is that a decision has been made, and that it’s informed by both current needs and future readiness.
We’ve broken this decision down into the 3C model: a practical framework to help you evaluate and plan your future SAP strategy and landscape through three essential lenses:
- Cost of ownership
- Complexity
- Conscious innovation
These ‘3 Cs’ offer a way to assess not just where you are today, but how ready you are for the future and what your next step should be.
The cost of ownership: Beyond licensing and infrastructure
Uncomfortable truth: You’re already paying, even if it’s not showing up as a line item.
Many companies assume Cloud = expensive. Between subscription licensing, migration services, and ongoing vendor relationships, the upfront cost can feel like a big jump. If you’ve already invested heavily in your on-premises landscape (infrastructure, hardware, licenses, internal teams), why walk away from that?
What’s good about staying on-premises (for now)?
- You maintain control over your infrastructure.
- Costs tend to be relatively stable and predictable.
- You’ve likely amortised large capital investments, reducing immediate spend.
- You avoid vendor lock-in (to some extent).
But.. what isn’t good about staying on-premises?
Here’s what often gets overlooked: maintaining an on-premises environment means owning everything – from patching and upgrades to monitoring, security, and scalability. You’re responsible for keeping the lights on, no matter how complex or outdated the setup becomes. That’s where the hidden costs can start to creep in.
If you choose to stay on-premises indefinitely, the cost of standing still may not hit your budget this quarter, but it will quietly compound over time. Technical debt accumulates, making each future change more disruptive and more expensive. Data becomes increasingly siloed, and your ability to adopt new features, especially AI-driven capabilities, lags behind, reducing the value you can deliver to the business.
Clients often ask, ‘What’s the price of Cloud?’ But the better question is, ‘What’s the cost of staying the same?
Bradley Jackson, Technology Solution Architect at EPI-USE Labs
The UNFILTERED truth
If your IT team is spending most of its time and budget just keeping the lights on, you’re not saving, you are stalling the inevitable. And while that cost might not appear on a balance sheet today, it will show up eventually – either in lost agility, missed opportunities, or a widening innovation gap.
The true cost of ownership isn’t just a financial metric. It’s time. It’s effort. It’s opportunity cost. And it directly impacts how fast you can turn ideas into outcomes.
- On-premises environments often incur hidden costs: delayed updates, custom development overhead, and longer return on investment (ROI) cycles.
- Cloud-ready organisations may face migration and retraining costs but benefit from faster access to innovation, speed, scalability, and reduced technical debt.
- Cloud-native businesses can focus their budgets on value-driven innovation rather than maintenance-heavy infrastructure.
When viewed through this lens, the cost of ownership becomes a strategic metric, not just a technical one.
Complexity: Keeping your SAP environment up-to-date in a changing world
Uncomfortable truth: If it takes a war room, a whiteboard, and three senior consultants to explain your SAP landscape… you’ve got a problem.
SAP environments age like fine wine (or like a Jenga tower, depending on how you approach growth). Over time, it’s easy for landscapes to become highly customised, deeply integrated, and virtually immovable. That complexity might feel like a badge of honour, but it can often lead to fragility, fear around change, and missed opportunity for modernisation.
What’s good about staying on-premises (for now)?
- You can maintain customisations that Cloud ERP may not (yet) support.
- Your business processes stay exactly as they are; there’s no need to adapt to fit-to-standard.
- You can run things on your own timeline without being forced into upgrades.
But.. what isn’t good about staying on-premises?
Complexity is a double-edged sword. What gives you control can also introduce rigidity, making it harder to innovate, harder to scale, and harder to respond to new business needs.
Cloud ERP, when designed with discipline, promotes best practices and agility through:
- Standardisation over customisation
- Composable architectures
- Platform-driven development (SAP BTP, low-code, and analytics-as-a-service)
What’s the cost of unmanaged complexity? It shows up as slow, frustrating change cycles, a growing reliance on niche expertise that’s hard to replace, and excessive effort required just to integrate, test, or support even minor updates. Every enhancement or upgrade becomes a risk, not a routine.
One of the biggest blockers to innovation is complexity - not technology.
Jhani Coetzee, Team Lead for NextGen SAP Development at EPI-USE Labs
The UNFILTERED truth
You don’t need to move to the Cloud to reduce complexity, but you do need to acknowledge it and commit to cleaning it up. The Cloud forces that discipline by design; on-premises doesn’t, which means if your landscape is messy, the clutter is yours to carry.
SAP landscapes can become complex over time, with layers of customisation, integration challenges, and inconsistent update cycles.
- For on-premises clients, complexity often creeps in through manual workarounds, inflexible integrations, and extended development timelines.
- For those moving to the Cloud, the challenge becomes clean-core transformation, integration strategy, and understanding what to let go of.
- And for those already in the Cloud, managing Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) and keeping things simple as new innovations roll out is critical.
Simplifying architecture, adopting modular tools like SAP BTP, and enabling low-code development platforms are ways all businesses can reduce complexity, regardless of where their SAP core resides.
Conscious innovation: Making progress intentional
Uncomfortable truth: Innovation doesn’t require the Cloud, but it does require intent.
Not every company can, or should, move to Cloud ERP right away. But that doesn’t mean you have to sit on your hands while the world evolves around you.
What’s good about staying on-premises (for now)?
- You control when, where, and how you innovate.
- You can still explore SAP BTP for integration, development, and analytics.
- You can adopt hybrid models that support your journey at your own pace.
- You avoid the disruption of transformational change when the business isn’t ready.
But.. what isn’t good about staying on-premises?
The mistake we see too often is businesses using ‘we’re not ready for the Cloud’ as a reason to delay innovation entirely. But there are plenty of moves available from where you are, for example:
- Tap into SAP Analytics Cloud for integrated planning and insights
- Use low-code tools to improve workflows and user experience
- Extend functionality with BTP while keeping your core on-prem
- Introduce AI and ML features with SAP context (even if only selectively)
What is the cost of passive innovation? You may risk falling behind competitors who are moving faster, adapting quicker, and leveraging technology more effectively. Your agility takes a hit when market conditions shift, and you miss out on the tangible benefits of embedded intelligence, automation, and smarter decision-making.
Continuous innovation doesn’t mean you change everything all the time. It means you keep evolving in a way that makes sense for your business.
Andrew Borresen, CTO and Solution Architect at G3G
The UNFILTERED truth
You don’t need to be in the Cloud to be innovative, but you do need a plan. Innovation doesn’t happen by accident, and ‘waiting for the right time’ often becomes a convenient excuse to avoid the uncomfortable but necessary conversations about change.
Innovation is no longer optional – it’s expected. But it needs to be conscious, continuous, and aligned to your business context.
- On-premises clients can still access innovation, but without built-in AI, business context models, or tools like Joule, progress often comes at a higher cost and slower pace.
- Cloud adopters can take advantage of embedded AI, machine learning, prebuilt APIs, and low-code tools to innovate continuously and incrementally.
- Existing Cloud users should focus on consciously consuming innovation, leveraging regular updates, prioritising business-led transformation, and managing change proactively.
No matter where you are in your SAP journey, the key is to make progress with purpose, not chase change for the sake of trends.
So, what’s the real cost of not moving?
We’re here to say that it’s not just financial, it’s about the cost of missed momentum.
The uncomfortable truth: In the fast-moving world of SAP and enterprise technology, standing still isn’t really standing still; it’s slowly losing ground. Every delay, every deferral, and every “we’ll look at it next year” moment chips away at your competitiveness.
That said, there is a strategic case for staying on-premises, as long as you’re actively managing cost, reducing complexity, and pursuing innovation with intent. The objective is awareness and action - being brutally honest about your current landscape, your constraints, and your capacity for change.
The UNFILTERED truth
Progress isn’t always about big leaps. Sometimes, it’s about making smarter steps in the right direction.
Whether you're on-premises, Cloud-curious, or exploring a hybrid path, we’ll meet you where you are. We’ve helped organisations at every stage reduce cost, simplify complexity, and modernise with purpose. Let’s start the conversation about what your SAP future could look like.