As they prepare their companies to thrive in the digital era, IT executives are transforming their own organizations and resources.

To optimize application delivery and support business goals for speed, agility, and innovation, they are deploying new applications in a private or public cloud environment. Existing applications are also coming under scrutiny, as IT leaders seek to enhance their long-time critical workloads with benefits such as automated scaling and ease of integration.

Consider a complex, mission-critical ERP system such as SAP, the workhorse that supports operations for many enterprises. According to a recent Frost & Sullivan survey, 26% of US-based enterprises have deployed SAP’s modern, cloud-based S/4HANA system for at least some of their SAP workloads; another 44% say they plan to do so.