Being Zeus in the Cloud

Little did I know that I would have a first-hand opportunity to achieve this feat for our own SAP Center of Excellence demo setup at Capgemini. With a two-month deadline in the last week of March 2020, I was asked to plan and move our entire demo setup from the existing cloud service provider to another. With literally no prerequisites, methods, or tools required to carry out such a transition, I began a methodical approach with my team to understand, plan, and execute the transition. We started in the second week of April 2020, and we successfully transitioned in the first week of May 2020.

The journey of hopping from one cloud service provider to another begins with understanding our demo landscape. Consisting of a constellation of all new-age SAP products used for developing and showcasing use cases and scenarios for customers, our demo landscape is at the heart of convincing customers of our prowess to bring the renewable enterprise to life.

Design

It is important to start with inventory of existing applications to assess their availability on the target cloud infrastructure. We reviewed our existing demo landscape setup to list all the demo servers, application versions, instance type, CPU, memory, and their utilizations. Once we were done with this exercise, it was time to touch base with cloud subject matter expert to design a demo landscape on the target cloud infrastructure.

Execution

Being a demo system doesn’t make it any less than a live production system. The system is in constant use globally and there was only a short window for the migration. Given the criticality of the demo landscape, all the team members worked around the clock with precision on each of their activities. Infra configured the target infrastructure (operating system, network, router, web-dispatcher, etc.) and enabled the SAP administration team to start with the transition of all SAP systems in synch.

We evaluated multiple options for moving the systems and went ahead with a system copy backup restore method. Although it did require us to re-configure SAP cloud connectors, it did reduce the number of post-processing activities. We performed the entire transition in two stages. In the first stage we moved most used critical systems, and in the second stage the systems that are used only on demand, such as the central finance setup.

In the end

The entire transition was treated like a mini project, including communication to all stakeholders at relevant junctures either for their validation or to inform about unavailability or the release of systems. Detailed planning with stakeholders and subject matter experts is key for the success of such transitions.

2019 was defining in many ways. We became the Microsoft SAP on Azure Partner of the Year and launched a new strategic initiative with Amazon Web Services. Spearheading solutions around automation, agility, redundancy, reliability and security with close to 30% cost savings, we’re tackling 2 ends of the spectrum – operational efficiency & business model transformation!

Walt Disney said, “The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.” Migration to the cloud is increasingly becoming key with SAP-led digital transformation and beyond all talks, you need teams that have done this themselves to be successful. Our experience is enriching enough to get started with supporting customers on such requirements immediately. Capgemini’s renewable enterprise approach considers move to cloud as fundamental and enables customers on their digital transformation journey. If you are looking for support on move to cloud or migrating from one cloud to another, please feel free to connect with me.