Designing a Cloud-Native Enterprise Intelligence Platform Integrating SAP S/4HANA, SAP Analytics Cloud, and Microsoft Azure

Abstract

Enterprises increasingly need a single platform that connects their operational systems to analytics, planning, machine learning, and generative artificial intelligence (AI). Building such a platform with traditional, server-centric methods produces landscapes that are slow to change, expensive to run, and fragile under stress. This article proposes a cloud-native design for an enterprise intelligence platform that integrates SAP S/4HANA as the system of record, SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) as the decision and planning layer, and Microsoft Azure as the foundation for integration, data, AI, and operations. The design applies cloud-native principles, including managed services, elastic scaling, loose coupling, automation, and resilience and security by design, across six layers and a platform engineering plane. Drawing on research into intelligent enterprise frameworks, large language model (LLM) integration with SAP, serverless computing, generative AI deployment, prompt engineering, guardrails, disaster recovery, and autonomous cloud operations, the article details each layer, proposes resilience tiers and evaluation metrics, and outlines a phased roadmap for adoption.