SAP BTP is marketed as a unified digital‑platform for innovation: integration, extension, analytics, and data services to complement core SAP systems (e.g., S/4HANA). While it promises agility, innovation, and scalability, it also comes with hidden complexities, potential cost overruns, and organizational risks. But like any platform of this scope, it comes with decision‑points and understanding the weaknesses up front helps avoid surprises, cost overruns or adoption failures.

Key Flaws & Challenges

Complexity & Steep Learning Curve

The platform spans many services from runtime environments, integration, analytics, data management to cloud‑foundry and ABAP in the cloud. Many analysts highlight a “Steep Learning Curve” and substantial training requirements. For organizations with traditional on‑premises SAP backgrounds the shift to cloud paradigms (DevOps, Microservices, CAP, Containers) can require new skill sets. For example:

“A lot of SAP customers assume their existing SAP developers can easily pick up BTP development. But BTP is not just ABAP—it requires skills in Cloud Application Programming Model (CAP), Node.js, Java, DevOps, and security best practices.”

Because of this, organizations without the proper internal capabilities may see slower progress or higher consulting expenses.

To avoid this: make sure your resource plan includes not only licensing/platform cost but also training, governance, staffing or partner support. The risk is that you adopt the platform but underutilize it or fall below expected value.

Cost, Licensing & Consumption Complexity

The pricing/consumption model is noted as being complex: monitoring memory hours, capacity units, message counts, task counts and there’s evidence of under-utilized credits.

“Credit Underutilization: SAP estimates nearly 25 percent of credits go unused due to lack of consumption strategy.”

For smaller organizations or those without strong governance, the platform may incur cost without sufficient return, or cost overruns if usage grows unexpectedly.

Implication: A clear usage/consumption plan is essential. The board should ensure business cases include not just build cost but ongoing billing, monitoring, and optimization.

Integration & Legacy System Challenges

Because many organizations are migrating from legacy on‑premises systems, integration of BTP with existing landscapes can be challenging and require significant effort and resources. Hybrid scenarios: the mixed use of cloud and on-premises can have latency, complexity in connectivity and network issues.

“Latency in hybrid scenarios: cloud applications talking sync to on‑prem systems can experience slow response times without caching or design patterns that buffer requests.”

There are hard platform limits; for example, the BTP Cloud Foundry environment documentation states: maximum app memory 16 GB, guaranteed CPU share of ¼ core per GB, disk quota up to 10 GB, max package size 1.5 GB. These are constraints for large scale compute or heavy workloads.

Implication: If your plan involves heavy integration, large data volumes or latency‑sensitive operations, you must validate the architectural fit. Migration cost should not be underestimated.

Platform Governance, Architecture & Service Fragmentation

Because BTP offers so many services, often from different runtimes/user‑experiences (Cloud Foundry, Kyma, ABAP Cloud, Neo) there is a risk of tool‑/runtime‑fragmentation, inconsistency, duplicated governance. For example, fragmented tooling occurs when teams must switch among BTP Cockpit, Cloud ALM, Business Application Studio and command‑line tools.

For organizations without strong cloud governance models, this can lead to “Wild West” development, uncontrolled sprawl of services, cost drift, security gaps.

Implication: Governance, architectural guardrails and a Centre‑of‑Excellence are important. Remember you need a clear “platform charter” clearly identifying what services are approved, who develops and how security is measured.

Security, Connectivity & Exposure Risks

While the platform provides many built‑in capabilities like Identity and Access Management (IAM), Encryption and Audit Logs there are still significant risks. Because BTP is designed to be deeply integrated with your core systems, vulnerabilities in the platform can have far‑reaching consequences.

Specific risks include misconfigured destinations/APIs; especially when connecting to on‑premises systems, can allow attackers to pivot into backend systems. Hardcoded or insecure credential management is also a frequent issue.

The platform imposes hard limits for audit event retention especially in Cloud Foundry, which may not satisfy some regulatory, compliance or forensic requirements.

Implication: For your context (you have a background in security/risk management), you must treat BTP like any other critical platform. Validate IAM, data flows, integration security, and ensure logging/audit meets your organization’s needs, especially when dealing with sensitive data.

Readiness & Change Management

Platform adoption risk worth stating as BTP adoption is growing, with many organizations cite skills gap and complexity of development as top challenges.

Treating BTP projects like traditional SAP projects has pitfalls if you don’t see or understand what’s being built until it’s almost done, it can lead to surprises and resistance to adoption and in some cases major rework.

Essentially, even a powerful platform can deliver little value if organizational readiness, user training, change management and process alignment are weak.

Implication: You must build not only the technical roadmap for BTP, but also the organizational roadmap: training, process changes, stakeholder engagement and governance. Ask for KPIs beyond “we deployed platform” to “we delivered outcome”, “we achieved adoption”.

Recommendations & Governance Checklist

To mitigate these flaws and increase the likelihood of success, consider the following governance/goals:

1. Skills & staffing plan:
   • Inventory current skills (ABAP, Basis, DevOps, cloud, CAP, Node/Java)
   • Develop training or hire consultants for BTP‑specific areas
   • Establish a cloud governance team or centre of excellence
2. Consumption‑and‑cost governance:
   • Define expected usage, budget, cost controls, monitoring dashboards
   • Track consumption: memory hours, capacity units, message credits, etc.
   • Monitor “credit waste” and adjust usage to maximize value
3. Architecture & integration review:
   • Before large investments, review integration paths to legacy systems, latency, connectivity, data flows
   • Validate whether BTP services can meet the scale, performance, and limits of your use‑cases
   • Choose appropriate runtime (Cloud Foundry, Kyma, ABAP Cloud) and minimize fragmentation
4. Security & compliance posture:
   • Implement IAM/least‑privilege, MFA, secure credential storage
   • Review destination/API configurations, ensure connectivity to on‑premises is hardened
   • Ensure logging, audit retention, forensic capability meets your regulatory or organizational risk requirements
   • Conduct periodic security reviews and penetration tests on BTP extensions
5. Change management & adoption:
   • Engage business stakeholders early: build prototypes/MVPs, not full big‑bang.
   • Define adoption KPIs: user usage, process improvement, cost savings, support metrics
   • Manage scope creep: freeze “must‑haves”, stage “nice‑to‑haves” for later phases
6. Exit / flexibility planning:
   • Include a “what‑if” scenario: what happens if the platform no longer meets needs, vendor changes terms, or strategic direction shifts
   • Make sure contracts/licensing are transparent and options understood
   • Maintain some modularity so you’re not locked into monolithic SAP‑only architecture

Conclusion

While SAP BTP offers significant promise; especially if you already operate in the SAP ecosystem, the reality is that it is not a plug‑and‑play silver bullet. The platform’s breadth and power are also sources of risk: complexity, cost, skills and governance overhead.

For an organization working on ambitious projects, you require a mature plan aligning platform capabilities with business outcomes, controlling cost, managing risk, ensuring adoption, and embedding governance.

If I were to summarize in one sentence: “Adopt SAP BTP if you’re prepared to invest in tooling, skills and governance—but don’t underestimate the effort, or treat it as a minimal cost, minimal‑governance deployment.”