In a cloud-first enterprise environment, workloads are rapidly shifting from on-premises systems to cloud-native architectures. SAP workloads, which form the digital core of many enterprise operations, are no exception. The AZ-120 certification stands at the intersection of cloud infrastructure and enterprise application management, offering professionals a unique specialization in planning and administering Microsoft Azure environments specifically for SAP workloads.
Key Themes
- Role Clarity: AZ-120 targets cloud professionals who engage in the design, migration, deployment, and optimization of SAP workloads on Azure.
- Business Need: Enterprises running mission-critical SAP systems look for engineers who can architect robust, high-availability environments in Azure while ensuring compliance, scalability, and performance.
- Enterprise Relevance: As cloud transformation accelerates, SAP system architects who understand both SAP Basis and Azure infrastructure models become essential.
- Skill Verification: The certification validates not just theoretical knowledge but hands-on familiarity with services like virtual networking, storage, identity, and backup—tailored for SAP.
Key Roles This Certification Supports
- Cloud Solution Architects (specializing in SAP)
- Infrastructure Engineers with SAP experience
- SAP Basis Administrators transitioning to Azure
- Azure professionals expanding into enterprise workload management
Unique Value Proposition
AZ-120 isn’t just about passing an exam; it’s about gaining fluency in an integrated workload environment. Unlike general Azure certifications, this one dives deeply into configuring high-throughput, low-latency infrastructure capable of supporting transaction-heavy SAP modules like S/4HANA and NetWeaver.
Exam Prerequisites (Strategic Insight)
Though there are no mandatory prerequisites, success in the exam often correlates with prior experience in:
- SAP system landscape design
- Azure Resource Manager deployment models
- Hybrid networking and identity integration
- High-availability architecture patterns
By mastering AZ-120, candidates position themselves as hybrid professionals—those who can speak both the language of SAP consultants and Azure architects, bridging the technical gap between infrastructure and enterprise platforms.
Deep Dive into the AZ-120 Exam Domains – What You’ll Really Be Tested On
The AZ-120 exam is built around a specialized skillset—professionals who can confidently deploy, configure, manage, and optimize SAP workloads on Azure infrastructure. This is not a generic cloud certification; it’s engineered for architects and engineers who are already familiar with SAP landscapes and want to migrate, scale, and maintain those environments on Azure.
To master this exam, candidates must not only know Azure fundamentals but must also possess an understanding of SAP’s operational components such as HANA, NetWeaver, S/4HANA, and the critical performance considerations that arise during cloud deployments.
1. Migrate SAP Workloads to Azure (25–30%)
This domain focuses on designing and executing a successful migration strategy for existing SAP workloads from on-premises or other cloud platforms to Azure.
Key Concepts Covered:
- Migration Planning: Understanding business and technical requirements before the move, including downtime tolerance, licensing, compliance, and workload profiling.
- Assessment Tools: Identifying the tools used for discovery, compatibility checks, and initial workload assessment. Tools should map the current SAP landscape to a future Azure environment.
- Migration Approaches: Covering both lift-and-shift and replatforming strategies. Includes traditional VM-based migration, HANA Large Instance (HLI) scenarios, and deployment of SAP HANA scale-out environments.
- Data Migration Techniques: Understanding import/export tools, backup and restore operations, snapshot replication, and migration of supporting infrastructure like file shares and databases.
Practical Implications:
Migrating SAP workloads isn’t just a file transfer operation. It’s a complete re-architecture of how business-critical data and application tiers function. For instance, latency between the application and database layers must be minimized. Throughput on storage must be optimized to handle SAP’s IOPS-heavy nature. A deep understanding of SAP landscape sizing, dependency mapping, and downtime windows is crucial.
2. Design and Implement an Infrastructure to Support SAP Workloads (25–30%)
This section emphasizes the architecting of Azure resources to meet SAP’s performance and operational demands.
Core Responsibilities:
- Compute Configuration: Selecting the right virtual machine series (e.g., M-series, Edsv5, Esv5) based on SAPS ratings, memory, CPU cores, and HANA certification requirements.
- Storage Planning: Designing disk layouts suitable for SAP’s data and log volumes. Knowledge of Azure Ultra Disk, Premium SSDs, and NetApp Files is essential.
- Networking: Building high-performance, secure networks. Includes the setup of Accelerated Networking, ExpressRoute for hybrid connections, Virtual Network Gateways, and segmentation of subnets by tier.
- Identity and Access Management: Integrating Active Directory and managing least-privilege access through role-based access controls (RBAC) and managed identities.
Real-World Significance:
Design errors in compute or storage can lead to enormous performance bottlenecks in SAP systems. Misaligned configurations often cause transaction slowdowns, delayed reporting, or even system instability under load. Certified professionals are expected to anticipate such issues before they occur by designing resilient and scalable solutions.
Example Scenario: A candidate may need to propose a design for a multi-region deployment where S/4HANA systems require 99.99% uptime. This means building in zones with application gateways, redundant storage arrays, and load balancing for application servers.
3. Design and Implement High Availability and Disaster Recovery (HA/DR) (20–25%)
Enterprise systems like SAP cannot afford unplanned downtime. This domain assesses how well the candidate understands high availability architecture and disaster recovery planning for SAP on Azure.
Core Topics:
- SAP High Availability Mechanisms: Understanding native SAP HA features like HANA System Replication, Enqueue Replication Server (ERS), and ASCS/ERS clustering.
- Azure HA Strategies: Implementing Azure Availability Sets and Availability Zones for VM redundancy. Using Azure Site Recovery for workload replication and failover.
- Geo-Redundancy and DR: Architecting region-to-region DR strategies with asynchronous replication. Implementing backup policies and restore workflows.
- Monitoring and Failover Testing: Setting up automated alerting for resource health and simulating disaster scenarios to validate recovery objectives.
Strategic Importance:
HA/DR is one of the most critical areas where theory meets practice. An incorrect HA configuration can go unnoticed until disaster strikes—when it’s already too late. This domain not only expects you to understand how SAP’s clustering works but how to overlay that on Azure’s platform services to achieve seamless failover.
Tip: It’s vital to distinguish between availability goals (99.9% vs. 99.99%) and the associated Azure resource selection. Candidates must also know how to architect the central services of SAP (like ASCS) in a clustered manner across zones.
4. Maintain SAP Workloads on Azure (15–20%)
While the earlier domains focus on planning and deployment, this final domain zeroes in on operational excellence—how to monitor, optimize, patch, and maintain SAP workloads post-deployment.
Main Focus Areas:
- Monitoring and Logging: Configuring Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, and Diagnostics Settings. Ensuring SAP workloads are correctly instrumented for telemetry.
- Performance Optimization: Identifying bottlenecks in CPU, memory, IO, or network. Using Azure Advisor, SAP EarlyWatch Reports, and performance counters to proactively resolve issues.
- Patch and Update Management: Establishing secure update policies, scheduling patch windows, and automating with tools like Azure Automation or Update Management.
- Security and Governance: Ensuring compliance with organizational security standards through the use of Azure Policy, Defender for Cloud, and identity governance best practices.
Enterprise Implication:
The success of an SAP-on-Azure deployment is measured not just by uptime, but by performance consistency and compliance. Many organizations expect certified professionals to not only configure systems but to keep them running at peak efficiency without manual intervention.
Example Use Case: A spike in memory usage causes performance degradation in the HANA database layer. A skilled AZ-120 certified engineer will use monitoring dashboards to diagnose root causes, increase VM memory allocation (if within support limits), or redistribute workloads across app servers.
How These Domains Connect in Real Life
Rather than treating the domains as isolated topics, professionals should understand that they form a continuous lifecycle:
- Assess & Migrate – Getting workloads to Azure.
- Design Infrastructure – Making sure they’re hosted correctly.
- Ensure Availability – Keeping workloads running without interruption.
- Ongoing Management – Monitoring, tuning, and improving over time.
This lifecycle mirrors what happens in actual enterprise environments, where teams don’t just move SAP systems to Azure—they keep them running optimally for years to come.
Key Challenges Professionals Face on the Exam
- Technical Breadth: Candidates must be fluent in both SAP internals and Azure services. This dual fluency is rare, making the certification more respected but also more demanding.
- Scenario-Based Thinking: Questions are often framed around real-world scenarios, requiring decision-making under constraints.
- Understanding Dependencies: Many Azure components have underlying interdependencies—such as ExpressRoute needing correct peering and routing setups—that must be correctly configured for SAP to function.
- Performance vs. Cost: Balancing performance with cost optimization is a recurring theme. For instance, should an Ultra Disk be used for tempdb? Only when the use case justifies the additional cost.
Study Framework for the AZ‑120 Exam – Rare Techniques That Work
Migrating and operating large enterprise workloads cannot be learnt by memorising feature lists; it is mastered through structured experimentation, reflective analysis, and disciplined iteration. The AZ‑120 exam rewards candidates who demonstrate that mindset.Adopt them sequentially—or remix them to fit your rhythm—knowing they form one integrated system.
1 Shift from Passive Reading to Scenario Simulation
Most learners begin with documentation PDFs or recorded classes. Those resources outline services but seldom capture what a system architect must decide when budgets, latency limits, and software life‑cycle restrictions collide. Replace passive reading sessions with scenario simulations: craft short prompts that describe a live enterprise landscape—an ECC instance on a legacy platform with strict downtime limits, a green‑field S/4HANA deployment targeting near‑zero recovery objectives, or a multi‑tier environment struggling with nighttime batch processing. For every prompt, write down your design approach, justify sizing choices, list migration prerequisites, and map monitoring hooks. Finally compare your solution with Azure architecture guides and refine. Daily practice with five‑minute scenarios develops reflexes the exam quietly measures: can you align a migration plan with throughput requirements while keeping network isolation intact?
2 Build a Personal Reference‑Architecture Library
After ten scenarios you will notice patterns: preferred VM series for different SAPS ranges, storage layouts that tame redo‑log latency, proven network hub‑and‑spoke variants that survive audit reviews. Document each in a living reference‑architecture notebook. Sketch component diagrams, annotate them with constraints, and add typical challenges—such as shared‑service VPN concentrators becoming single points of failure. Maintaining this repository does two things. First, it creates visual cues that accelerate memory retention: a diagram learned today is easier to recall under exam pressure than a paragraph read last week. Second, it provides an instant design palette when a new scenario appears—whether in study groups, white‑boarding interviews, or real projects.
Tip: keep each architecture on a single page and version it when you iterate. By exam week you should have at least fifteen compact blueprints covering lift‑and‑shift, refactor, scale‑out, and hybrid connectivity patterns.
3 Adopt Laboratory Sprints Instead of Endless Labs
Hands‑on experience is essential, yet many candidates waste evenings clicking through portals without a goal. Structure lab time into weekly sprints, each anchored on one exam domain weight:
- Migration sprint (first week): build discovery reports with assessment tools, capture sizing metrics, test import/export journeys for both application and database layers.
- Infrastructure sprint (second week): spin up the entire stack twice—once with standard premium disks, once with ultra disks—and run synthetic load to measure IO variance.
- Availability sprint (third week): build high‑availability clusters, break them, and prove failover meets target recovery.
- Maintenance sprint (fourth week): configure telemetry, force resource contention, observe alerts, and tune thresholds.
Treat each sprint like a miniature project. Set entrance criteria (“baseline VM deployed”), exit criteria (“data replicated with under two minutes capture gap”), and produce a summary log. These artefacts will later serve as quick‑glance revision sheets.
4 Instrument Structured Performance Drills
Performance issues seldom originate from a single metric; they reveal multifaceted tension between compute, memory, storage, and network. To sharpen intuition, craft performance drills that isolate one dimension at a time. Examples:
- Memory pressure drill – start a workload inside a VM sized at the lower end, gradually increase database buffer pool, watch paging, then resize vertically; observe query time improvement.
- Storage burst drill – simulate log volume spikes with a stress tool, switch among cached, premium, and ultra disks, record throughput consistency.
- Cross‑zone latency drill – place app tier and DB tier in different zones temporarily, measure response degradation, then place them back to demonstrate impact.
During each drill, jot down threshold values that trigger alerts and note which Azure monitoring views exposed the root cause fastest. This habit creates a mental catalogue of “symptom‑to‑service‑mapping” that the exam’s troubleshooting questions expect you to recall instantly.
5 Embed Decision Trees for Exam Scenarios
Many questions are scenario‑based multiple‑choice sets, where several answers sound reasonable. Build decision trees for recurring design forks:
- Ultra disk versus premium SSD – branch on log volume throughput requirement, then cost.
- Availability set versus availability zone – branch on cross‑zone latency tolerance, then regional capacity.
- ExpressRoute Global Reach – branch on on‑premise to on‑premise traffic flow requirement, then optional latency targets.
Print those trees, keep them visible during study blocks, and redraw them from memory at the end of each week. By externalising decision logic you transform fuzzy judgement into repeatable flowcharts, shrinking mental load when facing complex stems.
6 Time‑Boxed Multi‑Domain Review Plan
In the final month, switch from domain‑focused sprints to rapid multi‑domain review cycles. Use the following cadence:
- Morning – fifteen‑minute flashcards for theory facts (limits, default SLA figures, identity service layering).
- Mid‑day – thirty‑minute design challenge from your scenario deck.
- Evening – forty‑minute lab replication of the design decision, verifying that theoretical assumptions survive real deployment.
Repeat for twenty‑one consecutive days. This distributed practice cements information in long‑term memory and keeps context‑switch agility high—a key skill when the exam jumps from network routes to database replication scripts in a single screen.
7 Leverage Cross‑Role Dialogues to Broaden Perspective
AZ‑120 professionals often mediate between application teams, infrastructure leads, and finance controllers. Emulate that environment by conducting mock dialogues: one study partner plays an SAP Basis administrator, another the networking lead, you act as the cloud architect, and vice‑versa. Each round, the “stakeholder” presents a concern—licensing cost control, segmented network security, audit compliance, or patch‑window impact. The architect proposes solutions, referencing concrete Azure constructs and SAP configuration flags. This exercise trains you to articulate trade‑offs aloud, refine explanations, and defend priorities—exactly the competence being assessed in case‑study questions.
If learning solo, record voice memos where you brief an imaginary leadership team. Playback reveals jargon overload or missing steps. Trim and repeat until messaging becomes crisp.
8 Mindset Conditioning and Stress Calibration
Beyond knowledge, the exam measures composure under time pressure. Build exam‑day resilience with deliberate stressors:
- Countdown practice – run question sets with shorter time limits than the real exam.
- Environmental noise – simulate disturbances (background chatter audio) so focus remains unbroken.
- Decision fatigue drill – complete a full case study, then immediately a second set targeting a different domain, mirroring the mental pivot required between sections.
After each session perform a brief reflection: Which clues did I overlook? When did hesitation spike? What breathing pattern restored clarity? Over weeks you create a personalised playbook to regulate adrenaline surges, ensuring peak reasoning during the actual test.
9 Map Knowledge Gaps into Actionable Backlog
Every lab, drill, or mock exam will surface unknowns. Rather than loose lists, record each gap as a backlog item with three fields: concept, concrete acceptance criteria, and target date. Example:
- Concept – Azure Storage replication tiers.
- Criteria – explain synchronous versus asynchronous copies and map them to SAP log backup retention.
- Date – next review block.
Gaps converted into backlog tasks become commitments, not vague intentions. Progress review sessions every weekend guarantee no weak spot persists for longer than a single cycle.
10 Final Week Compression Strategy
In the last seven days, protect energy reserves. Reduce lab build hours to avoid fatigue; spend mornings on architecture diagram recall, afternoons on practice questions, evenings on light revision walks. Prioritise sleep, hydration, and active breaks. By now your reference‑architecture library, decision trees, performance logs, and backlog completions provide enough depth—cramming additional one‑off facts yields diminishing returns.
Leveraging the AZ‑120 Certification for Strategic Impact – Beyond Exam Success
Passing the AZ‑120 exam is a milestone, yet its true power is unlocked only when certified professionals translate their new expertise into strategic value for projects, teams, and the wider organization It explores four dimensions: personal career trajectory, enterprise architecture influence, operational excellence, and future‑proof learning.
1 Personal Career Trajectory – From Specialist to Visionary
1.1 Hybrid Fluency as a Differentiator
Most technologists excel in either infrastructure or application domains; few combine depth in both. AZ‑120 certified professionals bridge that gap, demonstrating an uncommon blend of cloud architecture principles and enterprise resource planning insight. This hybrid fluency immediately sets them apart during promotion panels or lateral moves, because they can converse comfortably with platform engineers about virtual network peering while advising finance leaders on ensuring material ledger close runs complete in the overnight window.
1.2 Expanded Responsibility and Visibility
Large organizations typically treat SAP migration projects as board‑level initiatives. When leaders search for someone to represent technical risks in steering‑committee meetings, they often elevate the engineer who can explain failover design, cost optimisation, and compliance in the same breath. AZ‑120 certification signals that capability, acting as an implicit endorsement that the holder understands both system internals and cloud governance. Visibility in such forums accelerates career progression, moving professionals from execution roles to decision‑making positions.
1.3 Competitive Salary Uplift
Compensation studies consistently show premium pay for specialists who can maintain mission‑critical systems in cloud environments. An engineer who keeps transactional throughput steady during month‑end finance processing or reduces recovery time after infrastructure incidents provides measurable business value. Salaries adjust to reflect that impact, especially when the skill set remains scarce.
2 Enterprise Architecture Influence – Designing for Resilience, Performance, and Cost
2.1 Architectural Decision Authority
After certification, engineers possess the vocabulary and analytical framework to evaluate infrastructure proposals holistically. They no longer accept standard reference diagrams at face value; instead, they challenge assumptions about storage latency, cross‑zone traffic, and authentication flow. By leading design reviews, they steer projects away from pitfalls such as under‑sized VMs for HANA scale‑out or neglected log volume throughput requirements.
2.2 Balancing Performance with Cost
Cloud expenditure can spiral rapidly when workload characteristics are poorly understood. AZ‑120 training equips professionals to read SAP early‑watch metrics and translate them into precise capacity plans. For example, they may recommend switching application tiers to burstable compute instances while reserving high‑memory VMs exclusively for database layers, trimming monthly bills without compromising performance targets.
2.3 Driving Governance and Compliance by Design
Certification objectives emphasise identity integration, backup retention, and data‑protection strategy. Graduates apply these principles to bake governance into the blueprint: implementing role‑based access control on resource groups that mirror SAP landscape tiers, enforcing tagging policies for cost allocation, and automating encrypted backups with immutable vaults. Such foresight reduces audit friction and fosters a culture of compliance‑as‑code.
3 Operational Excellence – Sustaining Mission‑Critical Workloads
3.1 Proactive Health Monitoring
The exam’s maintenance domain teaches candidates to integrate telemetry from both Azure Monitor and SAP internal tooling. Practitioners then build dashboards that track read latency on data volumes, enqueue replication lag, and global route health in a single view. Early detection of anomalies, coupled with automated runbooks, slashes mean time to resolution and preserves business continuity.
3.2 High‑Availability Test‑Driven Culture
Many organizations treat disaster‑recovery documentation as shelfware. AZ‑120 certified engineers champion a test‑driven approach, scheduling regular simulated outages to validate recovery point objectives. They script failover drills that move ASCS services across zones, replay log shipping for HANA system replication, and measure application restart duration. Repeated practice transforms recovery from theoretical guarantee to dependable routine.
3.3 Continuous Performance Tuning Loop
Workloads evolve, code changes, and data volumes grow. Certified professionals institute quarterly performance‑tuning sprints that mirror the iterative labs they executed during exam preparation. They baseline key transaction runtimes, add index recommendations, adjust kernel parameters, and resize compute instances where necessary. Over time, this loop yields compounding efficiency gains and keeps user experience consistent even as business transactions climb.
4 Catalysing Digital Transformation – Beyond SAP Migration
4.1 Extending Integration Patterns
Once SAP workloads sit reliably in Azure, certified engineers often lead integration of emerging platform services: streaming telemetry into real‑time analytics, exposing OData endpoints through secure APIs, or automating purchase‑order approvals with low‑code orchestration. The same design mind‑set that balanced cost, resilience, and governance now accelerates innovation.
4.2 Modernising Legacy Extensions
Traditional on‑premises landscapes sometimes rely on custom exits or batch scripts written for a different era. With cloud familiarity, AZ‑120 professionals can refactor those components into containerised microservices or serverless functions, abstracting them from rigid hardware dependencies. This modernisation not only reduces technical debt but also simplifies future upgrades to S/4HANA versions or adds machine‑learning capabilities.
4.3 Advancing Sustainability Initiatives
Cloud economies of scale include dynamic resource rightsizing and carbon‑aware workload placement. By sizing systems precisely and powering them down outside batch windows, architects reduce energy usage. Many enterprises now track sustainability metrics alongside cost and performance; the engineer who designed an environmentally conscious SAP architecture becomes a visible contributor to corporate social responsibility goals.
5 Future‑Proof Learning – Maintaining an Edge in a Rapidly Evolving Landscape
5.1 Continuous Recertification Strategy
Cloud features and SAP releases evolve regularly. Professionals should schedule periodic knowledge refresh cycles: reading release notes, joining community discussions, and experimenting in sandboxes. Setting a semi‑annual goal—such as mastering the latest disk throughput enhancements or exploring integration with next‑generation event hubs—keeps skills aligned with platform capabilities and ensures architecture recommendations remain relevant.
5.2 Cross‑Certification Pathways
After AZ‑120, engineers may pursue adjacent certifications in data engineering, security, or AI. Each incremental credential layers new competencies onto the core of SAP‑on‑Azure expertise, broadening solution spaces. For instance, combining AZ‑120 knowledge with data engineering skills allows the architect to design real‑time analytics pipelines that ingest SAP operational data and drive business insights.
5.3 Community Contribution and Thought Leadership
Writing technical blogs, speaking at user groups, or mentoring colleagues multiplies the value of individual experience. Communicating lessons learned from production incidents—such as subtle kernel parameter adjustments that halved batch runtime—builds personal brand while elevating team capability. In turn, peer feedback sharpens one’s understanding and uncovers fresh perspectives.
6 Measuring Impact – Practical Metrics and Narratives
6.1 Operational Metrics
Track quantifiable outcomes: reduction in unplanned downtime minutes, increase in batch throughput, percentage cost savings from reserved instances, or recovery‑time performance against design targets. Report these metrics to leadership to demonstrate ROI on certification investment.
6.2 Project Delivery Metrics
Document shorter migration timelines, fewer post‑go‑live incidents, and faster issue triage times. Linking those improvements to architecture decisions rooted in AZ‑120 competence underscores business value.
6.3 Qualitative Narratives
Capture stories where hybrid fluency defused project risk. Perhaps a last‑minute performance bottleneck emerged, and the certified engineer diagnosed misaligned storage cache policies within an hour—preventing a go‑live delay. Executive sponsors often remember effective crisis resolution more vividly than raw numbers.
7 Pitfalls to Avoid – Sustaining Momentum After Certification
7.1 Complacency
It is tempting to view the credential as an endpoint. Instead, treat it as a platform for continued learning. Technology roadmaps, licensing models, and best practices will shift; staying curious is mandatory.
7.2 Tool Overload
Cloud platforms offer a flood of new features. Resist adopting every novelty without a clear workload benefit. Maintain focus on the performance, availability, and operational simplicity of mission‑critical SAP systems, selecting services that directly enhance those dimensions.
7.3 Silo Reversion
The certification journey broke down walls between app, infra, and operations teams. Ensure day‑to‑day behaviour reflects that cross‑functional mindset: host shared design sessions, co‑write incident retros, and design monitoring dashboards visible to both Basis administrators and network engineers.
Conclusion
AZ‑120 certification marks the beginning of a career phase defined by higher‑order thinking, systemic influence, and measurable business impact. By applying hybrid fluency, disciplined architecture practices, and relentless operational tuning, professionals become architects of resilience and champions of efficiency. They navigate complex stakeholder landscapes with confidence, guiding SAP workloads through migrations, optimisations, and continuous innovation cycles.
In parallel, organizations reap increased availability, reduced cost, and accelerated digital initiatives powered by modern integration patterns. The ripple effects extend further: talent development pipelines strengthen, sustainability goals progress, and enterprise agility rises.
Ultimately the value of AZ‑120 goes far beyond a digital badge; it resides in the professional’s ability to weave infrastructure reliability, application vitality, and strategic foresight into a coherent narrative—one that turns cloud potential into operational excellence and competitive advantage. By embracing lifelong learning and community collaboration, AZ‑120 certified engineers stand ready to lead the next wave of enterprise transformation, ensuring that critical workloads remain robust, performant, and primed for whatever innovations tomorrow brings.