Organisations planning to move their applications to the cloud should first establish proofs of concept so they can identify and mitigate any potential risk of business disruptions and compliance gaps.
Although it is difficult to avoid any disruption to the business in a typical software migration, especially if legacy and complex applications such as SAP are involved, building a POC before embarking on the move will minimise the impact on the business and enable a near-zero-downtime migration.
This is important for SAP workloads that support daily operations for companies in industries such as retail, financial services and manufacturing, where extended system downtime will have a significant impact on the business.
A POC not only provides a clear migration path but also outlines what organisations should expect en route to the cloud.
A key step in the journey to the cloud is to find partners that can help build POCs that are aligned with business requirements. This helps ensure the organisation’s move to the cloud will meet its objectives as well as lay the foundation for future deployments.
Cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) offer further assistance with funding and technical support to guide customers with their POCs and kick-start their cloud migration. The AWS POC Program, for instance, provides enterprises with $1,000 in AWS credits and a complementary architecture review.
Customers also can work with certified AWS partners, including Lemongrass, that have expertise in creating POCs and can address worries businesses have with their move to the cloud. These concerns are usually about how the cloud platform will work with existing system configurations, whether large databases can continue to perform well, and if systems will remain secure and meet all compliance requirements after the migration.
Depending on the scope of work and system complexities, a POC can take between two and four weeks to build. It should showcase the agility of the cloud solution and demonstrate how quickly a system can be built, shut down and removed.
The POC will highlight how your systems can be optimised and how best to mitigate risks identified during the migration assessment. It provides a way to identify what can go wrong and to plug the gaps before you make the final transition.
The objective here is to ensure you are fully confident in the migration roadmap before moving your SAP workloads to AWS.
Uncovering Potential Benefits From Cloud Migration
For customers such as Super Retail Group (SRG), it also uncovers benefits they otherwise would not have realised are possible.
Australia’s seventh largest retailer, SRG offers a wide product portfolio that includes automotive, outdoor and sporting brands across almost 700 stores in Australia and New Zealand. It also operates online stores that have seen significant traffic amid the global pandemic, which has pushed more consumers to transact online. E-commerce accounts for 12% of SRG’s total sales and helps drive foot traffic to its physical stores, with some 50% of customers opting to collect their online purchases in stores.
SRG, however, found itself unable to keep up with demand due to its legacy on-premises IT infrastructure. Its customers experienced slow page load times during events such as Black Friday and Boxing Day, and this affected transaction volumes.
Realising the urgent need to move to the cloud and transform its IT infrastructure, the Australian retailer worked with Lemongrass to move its 21 SAP applications to AWS. These included the customer relationship management (CRM) software that supports SRG’s retail stores. It meant that any downtime from the migration had to be minimised to ensure transactions would not be significantly impacted.
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Download NowLemongrass was able to steer a migration path that kept the retailer’s CRM, sales, enterprise resource and accounting systems running during the transition, without operational disruption or impact to customer experience. This was a significant achievement, as the migration included 37 TB of SAP ERP Central Component and 12 TB of SAP CRM databases.
With the move to AWS, SRG now is able to boost its computing capacity for SAP systems within an hour to handle any spikes in sales. Previously, it would take months just to procure new hardware.
SRG also is able to maintain business continuity at 99.95% uptime. The retailer enhanced its DevOps capabilities, improving its automation and development speed, with the addition of 800 CPUs running Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances to optimise memory and compute capacity for its SAP systems.
In addition, AWS Lambda was deployed to automatically process event triggers from Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and AWS Connect. These AWS solutions automate customer services, track tasks to completion and monitor issues toward resolution.
The SAP migration to AWS also uncovered new opportunities for operational agility. For instance, with a fully automated point-of-sale (POS) test environment, SRG now can deploy changes within minutes across store locations. It also slashed its POS development time from weeks to days.
SRG’s successful migration would have been less likely if it had not first invested the time to carry out a proper assessment and establish a POC, with guidance from AWS and Lemongrass. With many possible routes toward the cloud, the key to a smooth transition is finding the solution that is attuned to your business needs and able to resolve anticipated issues.
