RISE with SAP vs. Traditional On-Premise Migration: What's Right for Your Organization

directly into project costs as an implementation credit rather than a marketing rebate, and additional uplift available for organizations that bring more lines of business into the cloud migration.

None of that makes RISE the automatically correct choice, though, and the same research that documents its growth also documents real reservations. ASUG's member survey found that concerns about cloud flexibility persist even as fears around security and cost have eased — a nuance that matters, because flexibility concerns are exactly what drove hybrid cloud adoption to double between 2024 and 2025 (from 9% to 18%) among ASUG members, as organizations sought a middle ground between full public-cloud commitment and the control of on-premise or private hosting.

There is also a genuine commercial trade-off worth naming plainly: RISE moves an organization from perpetual, owned licences to a subscription model, and giving up perpetual licensing is a one-way decision with no straightforward path back if the subscription economics stop working in the customer's favour. Cost unpredictability under subscription models is a real and widely reported concern — a Rimini Street and Foundry survey of 455 SAP customers found that 92% of IT leaders cite escalating subscription costs as a concern, and a related survey found 95% describe achieving a positive ROI from their SAP transformation as “challenging.”