ADAPTING TO BUSINESS GROWTH

Acuster develops, manufactures, and markets products and services for the water, gas, mining, and telecommunications industries. The company originally started operating in the Spanish market, but as the company grew and expanded internationally, so did its IT requirements. 

To this point, Zoi had managed the customer’s entire SAP platform in its local data center and was therefore familiar with the customer’s SAP environments. It soon became clear that the Acuster group was in need of a solution that could provide them with more flexibility and allow them to grow in line with their business.

MIGRATION OF SAP ENVIRONMENTS TO THE CLOUD

The customer needed a system that was flexible and scalable; allowing them to immediately adapt to the needs of the business. Therefore, it made sense to migrate their SAP environments to the AWS Cloud as this would address their needs perfectly.

Zoi has created the Migration Factory for SAP to help customers, such as Acuster, to migrate their on-prem SAP environments to the Cloud. The Zoi program follows the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) and uses a proven 3-phased framework to help achieve migration goals. By following SAP and AWS best practices, Zoi provides the most efficient, secure, and reliable way to migrate SAP workloads to AWS.

ZOI’S ESTABLISHED SAP TO AWS MIGRATION PROGRAM

The objective of this project was to migrate the entire SAP infrastructure to the AWS Cloud and then continue to manage it as before. Zoi not only had to perform the migration but also upgrade the customer’s version of S/4HANA 1511 to S/4HANA 1909 and do so while minimizing the impact on the business as much as possible.

As in all SAP Cloud Migration projects, it was very important to have technicians with both SAP and hybrid cloud knowledge. Additionally, when making a version change in the transition to the cloud, it is essential to have a functional and development team in addition to the Basis and Cloud team. In this way, Zoi ensured that SAP and AWS best practices were followed.

Following the methodology of the Zoi Migration Factory, three clearly differentiated phases were established: 

1. Assess
2. Mobilize (Proof of Concept)
3. Migrate and Modernize

The Assess phase consisted of discovery workshops to uncover Acuster’s SAP landscape, infrastructure, AWS capabilities, and organizational setup. This was followed by assigning priorities and dependencies and identifying business constraints. Lastly, the initial cloud architecture was designed and a complete migration plan was developed. 

In the Mobilize phase, Zoi created all the necessary infrastructure on AWS to begin the installation of SAP systems, including setting up a test environment. A VPN between Acuster and AWS was established and a S/4HANA sandbox environment was developed. This was an important phase of the project – it allowed any mistakes to be fixed and helped to optimize the final migration process to the production environment. In this way, downtime to Acuster’s systems was minimized. 

The Migrate and Modernize phase used learnings and processes from the previous phase but with the Acuster production environment. A support period was established with the customer to identify and fix any bugs that were not detected during the Mobilize phase.

The project lasted 7 weeks and in total 14 SAP servers were migrated to the AWS Cloud. A multidisciplinary team consisting of an analyst, specialist, senior expert, and project manager completed the project. The Acuster team consisted of the CTO and a senior systems consultant.

BENEFITS OF MIGRATING SAP ENVIRONMENTS TO AWS

The AWS Cloud provides a reliable, cost-effective, scalable, and secure platform for companies to host their SAP environments.

ABOUT ACUSTER

Acuster was founded in 1973 as a family business making components for water and gas supply networks. In the beginning, it was characterized by being a pioneer in the introduction of polyethylene accessories and welding machines to the Spanish market. The company now has production facilities in Spain and the Netherlands, and numerous branches spread across three continents.