What stays your job under RISE with SAP

RISE with SAP bundles S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition, infrastructure on a hyperscaler, technical managed services and a set of tools into one subscription. It simplifies a lot. It does not hand your whole SAP operation to SAP, and the gap between what customers assume and what the contract says is a common source of trouble after go-live.

What SAP typically takes on

Under RISE, SAP is generally responsible for the infrastructure, the operating system and database, backups, technical monitoring of the system, applying the updates you schedule, and the technical side of high availability and disaster recovery as defined in your service description.

What usually stays with you

• Application management. Functional support, incident analysis in business processes, configuration changes and enhancements.
• Custom code and extensions. Development, testing and remediation at each upgrade.
• Security roles and user access. Role design, provisioning, segregation of duties and access reviews.
• Testing. Regression testing for upgrades and changes, including the test automation that makes it affordable.
• Data. Master data quality, migration and archiving decisions.
• Interfaces outside the SAP system. Partner connections, middleware you run and the network path from your sites.
• Decisions on when to upgrade, within SAP's maintenance windows.

Some tasks sit in between, such as transports, client copies or certain Basis activities, and their ownership depends on the exact service description and any additional services you buy. Read the roles and responsibilities document line by line with your support team present.

Three things to do before signing

1. Map your current support model against the RACI. For every task your Basis, AMS and infrastructure teams perform today, decide who will do it under RISE.
2. Budget for the work that remains. Application management, security and testing do not shrink because the infrastructure moved.
3. Plan to use what is included. RISE comes with BTP credits, process insight tools and SAP Cloud ALM. Give someone ownership of each, or they go unused.

RISE can be the right choice for many companies. It works best when everyone knows on day one who picks up the phone for each kind of problem.