Issue

Recommendation

Background & Context

Assumptions

• The ERP Rebuild program aims to, where possible, deploy a single, global instance of every enterprise system in scope of the program. Separate instances for specific countries (e.g. China) are not being deployed, because a thorough investigation into the relevant legal, regulatory, strategic, and security aspects determined that adequate security controls could be attained in a single-instance system without physical separations. 
• There are no technical barriers which limit access of Syensqo staff to the jurisdictions being considered for hosting the enterprise systems. Specifically Syensqo users located in mainland China are able to access business systems, including SaaS systems, via Syensqo-managed VPN tunnels regardless of the physical location of these systems. See also Specific architecture for China. 

Constraints

• Due to the incumbency of the European Union as both the physical location for Syensqo's existing enterprise systems and data processing (e.g. by Shared Services staff in Portugal, management staff in Belgium and France), Syensqo do not have a comprehensive internal contractual framework for the export of various data from the EU to other jurisdictions. Scoping and implementing such a framework is a prerequisite for the implementation of enterprise systems outside of the EU. It may not be possible to fully implement the required contracts and processes within the timeline of the ERP Rebuild program. 

Impacts

Business Rules

Options considered

Option A: 

Option B: 

Option C: 

Option D: 

Evaluation

	Option A Located in USA	Option B Located in EU
Legal/regulatory requirements for data localisation	Pro Con	Pro Pro
Internal legal support, inc. data export and data processing agreements	Pro Con	Con
Availability of SaaS applications	Pro	Con
Depth and breadth of technology platform components
Network latency impact for end users
Carbon footprint		The electricity grid in major European data center locations (e.g. Netherlands) tends to be marginally less CO₂-intensive than in major US locations (e.g. Virginia) when judged on an annual basis. For the year 2023, the CO₂ intensity of the Dutch grid on a consumption basis was 301gCO₂eq/kWh vs. 396gCO₂eq/kWh for Virginia.
	All major IaaS providers purchase electricity via long-term purchase agreements from power utilities, often under direct purchase agreements which favour renewable energy, rather than obtaining power directly from the national grid. They also tend to purchase renewable energy offsets for a large part of their operations (e.g. in 2023, AWS offset 100% of their carbon emissions in 22 Regions). Their actual CO₂ footprint is thus likely to be quite different to that of the national grid.

See also

List of SAP Data Centres for SAP Cloud Services

Maps showing the carbon intensity of the electricity grid by geography

Regional coverage of relevant SAP SaaS and PaaS Solutions

A summary of the List of SAP Data Centres for SAP Cloud Services for products and services relevant for Syensqo is represented below. The information for this summary table was retrieved in September 2024, using the then-current version v.9-2024 of the document. 

Available of a product or service in only a single region in a particular geography may limit the Disaster Recovery options available for that service. This is thus represented as a paler shade of green in the table below. 

Change log

Workflow history