As an SAP Business One partner, you've probably noticed something: your on-premise customers tend to fall into two camps. There are the ones who regularly ask when you'll support cloud deployments, who mention colleagues at other companies running things in AWS, and who seem genuinely interested in exploring what modern looks like. And then there are the customers who are completely settled in their on-premise installations, convinced that what they have is working fine, and broadly sceptical about cloud adoption.
As an SAP Business One partner ourselves, we have found that the second group often aren't aware of the technical and commercial risks quietly building underneath their systems. This post walks through five of the most common red flags we see, and what they actually mean if you're thinking about having a conversation about the future with this type of customer.
1. Infrastructure support is running out of runway
Most on-premise SAP Business One installations run on either Windows Server or SQL Server, and here's the thing about those platforms: they have end-of-life dates. Windows Server 2016 reached end of support in January 2022. Windows Server 2019 will reach end of extended support in January 2029. A customer running their system on 2016 right now is technically on unsupported infrastructure, which means they're not getting security patches, they're not eligible for support from Microsoft, and they're completely exposed if a vulnerability is discovered.
The problem gets more interesting when you dig into it. Many customers won't realise they're running an end-of-life version until something breaks and they call their IT provider, only to discover that the version they're on isn't supported anymore. Upgrading to a newer version of Windows Server or SQL Server sounds straightforward until you factor in SAP Business One compatibility matrices, the potential need to upgrade other software dependencies, downtime windows, testing requirements, and the cost of the licence upgrades themselves. What started as a software update becomes a six-week project that ties up your technical team, creates business risk, and often costs far more than the customer expected.
For your customers, this is worth knowing about now while they still have options and time to plan.
2. Backup and disaster recovery are more hope than plan
Walk into most SME server rooms and you'll find a backup system that's been running for years without much attention. It might be a tape drive, it might be a network-attached storage device, it might be some combination of the two. What's common is that the backup plan is old, it's not being tested properly, and most people in the business have completely forgotten that it exists. When was the last backup actually restored? When was the disaster recovery plan last rehearsed? For the vast majority of on-premise SAP customers, the honest answer is ‘we're not sure,’ and sometimes ‘never.’
This matters more than most customers realise. A catastrophic failure doesn’t happen gradually. A ransomware attack, hardware failure, fire or water leak in the server room, can destroy precious hardware in minutes. This creates a critical level of urgency – businesses need access to their data to continue operating, so they need systems back online as soon as possible. If your backup systems aren't tested regularly, you discover they don't work on the morning you actually need them. We've seen several customers in this position and it's not a comfortable place to be.
Cloud deployments change this fundamentally because disaster recovery is built into the infrastructure, it's tested automatically, and it's something the provider guarantees.
3. Security compliance is increasingly difficult to prove
Every industry has strict security and compliance requirements. ISO 27001, SOC 2, GDPR, PCI-DSS amongst many others. For on-premise SAP Business One installations, maintaining documented security and compliance becomes a project in itself. You need to prove that you're patching systems regularly, that you're controlling who has access to what, that you're encrypting sensitive data, that you're monitoring for suspicious activity, and that you can demonstrate all of this to an auditor.
Many SMEs have someone in IT who's responsible for this, but the documentation and controls often don't exist at the level an auditor actually needs to see. When a customer is looking to win a contract from a larger enterprise customer, or when they're subject to a security audit for the first time, they suddenly discover that proving they meet the compliance requirements is significantly more complex and expensive than they expected. Building the controls, documenting them, implementing monitoring tools, and training staff takes time and money.
Cloud platforms come with security and compliance built in, with audit trails, monitoring, and reporting that's often difficult to achieve on-premise. It's not that cloud is automatically more secure, but the infrastructure-level controls are handled by the provider, not by an overworked IT team.
4. Scaling is becoming unexpectedly expensive and complex
On-premise SAP Business One starts with an initial server deployment. If the customer grows, adds users, or expands the database significantly, at some point they hit the limits of what that hardware can do. Adding more capacity then requires either upgrading the existing server (a process with downtime) or migrating to a larger server (also disruptive). Either way, it's a capital project that requires downtime, testing, and vendor involvement.
The cost of that growth is almost always higher than the customer anticipated because they're buying hardware for peak load and paying for it all at once, rather than paying for what they use when they use it. A customer who added two new sites and fifty new users two years ago probably spent significantly more on infrastructure than they would have if they were in the cloud, where you scale elastically and pay monthly.
The other part of this is complexity. On-premise systems don't scale across geographies or time zones as elegantly as cloud does. If you have teams in multiple locations, each location might need local infrastructure or at least a well-configured network setup to ensure acceptable performance. Cloud removes that architectural complication.
5. Total cost of ownership is hidden in operational expenses
This is perhaps the most insidious problem because the costs are distributed across multiple budgets and they compound over time. An on-premise system has infrastructure costs, licensing costs, support costs, patching and updating costs, security tool costs, compliance management costs, and the salary costs of the person or team managing it all. When you add it up across five years, the total cost is often two to three times what the customer would have spent on a cloud-based system.
But because these costs are embedded in operational budgets and IT line items, customers don't see them clearly. They remember the big capital cost of implementing SAP Business One on-premise years ago, and the current cost seems small in comparison. What they don't see is that they're spending £15-20K every year on infrastructure, support, and management that would simply go away with a cloud deployment.
The business case for migration often becomes clear only when you add it all up, and many customers have never done that exercise. If you've got a good relationship with your customer's CFO or finance director, this is worth exploring. The numbers often surprise people.
What this means for your partnership
These red flags aren't reasons to scare customers or push them toward decisions they're not ready to make. They're conversation starters. A customer who understands these risks, who's had someone help them think through what they mean, and who has a clear picture of what alternatives exist is in a position to make a genuine choice about what comes next. And that conversation, more often than not, leads toward exploring what cloud could offer.
The partners who are winning with cloud migrations are the ones having these conversations now, while customers still have time to plan, rather than after a crisis forces their hand. If you have customers who want to explore these issues in more detail, and really understand how migrating SAP Business One to the cloud can help them mitigate risks and future-proof their business, please contact our specialist team now – we’re always happy to help.
