As companies look to move their SAP systems and workloads to the cloud, they will want a roadmap that gets them there in the quickest time possible and in a way that is least disruptive to the business.
They can achieve that by automating not only the processes needed in the migration but also the operational functions that will enable them to gain new efficiencies after the transition and increase their cloud return on investment (ROI).
Preparing applications and systems running on legacy infrastructure for the cloud can be complex, with thousands of functions and checks to carry out. As it is, organisations spend significant time and resources on repetitive administrative tasks just to keep SAP systems up and running.
By automating where possible, you can free up your staff to focus on more critical tasks and drive productivity. Removing manual jobs also reduces human errors, ensuring your systems remain robust and secured, and cuts the amount of work and cost to maintain your systems.
The ability to automatically build systems on demand further reduces the size of your IT footprint. It also eases your migration journey, drives business agility and enables continuous transformation, which is key to extracting the full benefits of the cloud.
In short, automation allows organisations to carry out tasks remotely and quickly, and with higher quality and efficiency. This is essential for business-critical applications such as SAP.
Cloud vendors such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) understand that and have developed solutions with automation capabilities to streamline their customers’ cloud migration. AWS works with partners, such as Lemongrass, that offer various services, including tools to streamline and automate processes, to help enterprises prepare their SAP applications and workloads for the cloud.
Automating the Way to Rapid Migration
One AWS customer, Stockland, was able to do so within a short 11-week deployment period.
The Australian property group manages a large portfolio of retail town centers, workplaces and residential communities and needed a robust IT architecture that could support its growth plans and drive high-value customer outcomes. Stockland was also experiencing performance issues with its custom-developed systems, which comprised mission-critical SAP systems that were running on another cloud platform.
To address these challenges, the company realised it needed to move its systems to a higher performing and more robust, secure cloud solution, and it needed to do so quickly. Its infrastructure, however, was highly complex, with large and highly customised SAP applications.
Looking to transform both its business and IT infrastructure, Stockland selected AWS and Lemongrass to put together a plan. Lemongrass was able to work through the intricacies by leveraging its Lemongrass Cloud Platform (LCP) to rearchitect Stockland’s systems. A governance, monitoring and automation solution, LCP optimises the migration and operation of SAP and other workloads.
Developed on proven methods as well as Lemongrass and AWS cloud best practices, LCP automated the build and operation of Stockland’s SAP systems on AWS. It not only facilitated an 11-week rollout but also drove a 25% improvement in system performance for Stockland immediately after the migration.
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SAP S/4HANA workloads were moved to a Landing Zone on AWS, running on multiple Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances and storing data in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets. In addition, LCP was deployed as the orchestration and automation layer between AWS and SAP.
Energy Queensland was able to complete its SAP migration without downtime in five months. The transition has provided the government-owned power company with the agility to create new IT environments and manage new initiatives more quickly. It previously had to undergo a lengthy and costly process to procure new servers whenever it wanted to start a new project. It can now provision virtual servers within minutes rather than days.
Stockland and Energy Queensland demonstrate that migrating SAP systems to the cloud offers opportunities for companies looking to drive higher operational resilience and greater value from their data.
Doing so on AWS, in particular, delivers on these promises and more. In fact, IDC research reveals that 85% of customers have reported SAP cost savings with AWS. These organisations also have reduced hosting costs between 50% and 80% and have gained another 40% to 50% in operational cost savings.
When properly implemented, modernising your applications for cloud can yield significant cost efficiency, speed of delivery and enhanced security. More important, it enables organisations to innovate and gain higher returns from their cloud deployment.
Businesses will need to continuously tweak their processes to tap the technological advancements that the cloud offers. This requires a mindset shift in application development and fine-tuning of operations to drive more ROI from their cloud.
