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SAP on AWS: Enhancing productivity with a better bottom line

Capgemini
June 1, 2021

Our customer supplies electricity and gas to over 26.2 million people and focuses on consumer-facing business and enhancing capabilities in areas such as energy optimization in homes. To address risk and to bring their services to the next level, they decided to take advantage of using the cloud. To support their customers in the most effective way, they decided to migrate SAP financial systems to AWS Cloud.

The Challenge

The SAP suite of applications plays a critical role with finance teams across the global operation who use them to determine the company’s financial position and to deliver crucial monthly, quarterly, and annual reports.

Our customer needed to replace many of the 100-plus servers supporting the SAP landscape when they reached end of life. The life of the infrastructure could not be extended, and the key concern was not to risk any issues affecting the performance of the software supporting its global enterprise.

The company reached out to us for the cloud-migration services and help them attain better performance, speed, and security.

Our Approach

In collaboration, we decided to take advantage of all the cloud-native services that AWS has to offer. We migrated 15 SAP financial systems along with 130-plus virtual machines and around 35 terabytes of data to AWS in just 10 weeks by using the highly secure AWS Landing Zone, Amazon EC2 for compute, and Amazon EBS, EFS and S3 for storage – without any disruption to the organization.

We helped our client seamlessly migrate its SAP financial systems to AWS despite everyone working remotely, thanks to the flexibility and commitment of everyone involved. We built a highly secure AWS Landing Zone and deployed the Capgemini Cloud Management Platform. With AWS Landing Zone in place, it automated the deployment of the identity and access management, governance, and data security controls for the seamlessly scalable Amazon EC2 instances running the SAP applications.

By migrating SAP to AWS, our customer reduced the cost for SAP S/4HANA based financial systems by 20 – 30% compared with the on-premises solutions. These savings helped align SAP systems with their strategic goals. The SAP S/4HANA systems became more agile, which boosted performance and helped our customer to capitalize on real-time insights. It enabled continued digital transformation, which helped our customer respond quicker to requests from the business for new environments and provide better support to personnel. It helped tailor the conversations with customers using artificial intelligence and machine learning. It has also help our customer drive innovation and deliver more value to its customers and shareholders.

Cloud migrations are not always fast, but with Capgemini’s framework and specially developed tools, migration becomes rapid and predictable. As our tools provide enough flexibility for each unique case, migration can be done with confidence in a faster and efficient manner.

This blog provides an overview of a cloud migration project that we implemented for one of our customers. At Capgemini, we have a lot of experience, use cases, and best practices in implementing cloud migration practices and designing and building cloud migration applications and systems for our enterprise customers. If you want more information about our experiences please contact us.

Author

Devendra Goyal
Head – Global SAP2Cloud Offer & SAP2Cloud Transformation