1 plan
defined to future-proof the entire SAP system with AWS
SoftwareOne case study
Banking on the cloud to support Brazilian entrepreneurs
Discover how a nonprofit financial cooperative in Brazil used an SAP on AWS assessment to plan out its cloud-based future, ensuring it can provide innovative services to help local entrepreneurs grow.
Brazil has the third largest entrepreneurship community in the world, with one in four adults being self-employed, and small businesses making up two out of three new jobs in the private sector. All these small businesses – from local farmers to coffee shop owners - need access to banking and financial services to help them grow sustainably. Many of them rely on a Brazilian nonprofit cooperative that provides financial support and services to them. But like many nonprofits, it had to find ways to keep costs down while providing innovative services to meet its members’ needs. The organization turned to SoftwareOne to move its SAP environment to the Amazon Web Services for greater community impact.
100%
clarity gained into costs, needs & expected benefits for an upcoming cloud migration
5 M
members will be better served with innovative financial services
- Client
- Nonprofit financial cooperative
- Industry
- Nonprofit
- Platform
- AWS Cloud
- Services
- SAP on AWS Assessment
- Country
- Brazil
Coping with an outdated SAP system
With more than 5 million members across the country, the nonprofit organization offers millions of people and businesses a wide range of services and products to manage their financial affairs – from banking to loans, investments, and insurance. It has a vision to provide sustainable growth for the whole of society, particularly supporting overlooked entrepreneurs, rural producers, and social projects in disadvantaged and rural communities.
However, to serve these customers often based in remote locations, the organization needed innovative online financial solutions. It had developed a series of digital products on AWS cloud, like mobile banking apps and online credit card services. But the underlying corporate IT environment consisted of disparate legacy IT systems and outdated applications. Its on-premises virtualized SAP infrastructure was complex, inflexible, and had poor scalability and little application resiliency. The organization’s small IT team struggled to cope with an SAP operating system that was running out of support, coupled with growing administrative overheads and ever-increasing hardware costs.
The team knew it could achieve better outcomes and provide better value to its cooperative members if it used AWS cloud technology. But without the in-house expertise to move its legacy data center cost-effectively to the cloud, it turned to SoftwareOne for guidance.
A comprehensive assessment with SoftwareOne
SoftwareOne conducted an SAP on AWS Assessment, with funding support from Amazon Web Services. As a certified AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) Partner for SAP, SoftwareOne applied its skills and experience to assess the nonprofit’s IT infrastructure to define a clear strategy and road map to move its substantial SAP workload to the AWS cloud.
Taking existing functionalities plus business and IT requirements into account, SoftwareOne recommended a lift-and-shift migration to move the SAP workloads completely from on-premises to AWS. The SAP development and quality assurance systems would be moved first, followed by the SAP production system. SoftwareOne defined the potential migration architecture, including high availability options, disaster recovery, and backup strategies. The plan set the migration timeline, future SAP landscape design, and estimates of AWS cloud consumption.
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Key recommendations from the assessment included:
- Reduced infrastructure costs: Review and right-sizing hardware usage to save 60 percent hardware costs.
- SAP application resiliency and scalability: Implementing a Disaster Recovery solution, reviewing the backup retention policy, and enabling data encryption to improve application stability and data protection.
- Bring SAP system up to date: Upgrading the operating system, applications, and database, including SAP ECC, SAP Fiori, SAP Portal, and Process Integration running on Oracle Database (RAC) and TDF on HANA to the latest versions, enabling better compatibility with the AWS cloud infrastructure and take advantage of new application features.
- Extend AWS Cloud Support Services: Increase from minimum AWS support level to dedicated SAP support on AWS instances.
Ready for cloud journey take-off
Moving critical workloads like SAP to the cloud can seem daunting, with a myriad of potential risks that could impact business operations. Staying on-premises, however, is not viable or affordable in the long term. The financial cooperative recognized this and had a duty of care to its 5 million members to ensure that any money invested is spent wisely and that the services they offer can meet evolving needs.
Thanks to the SAP on AWS Assessment, the nonprofit has accelerated its cloud journey and has a defined plan to future-proof its SAP infrastructure. The small IT team has a far better understanding of how to move from on-premises to AWS taking a lift-and-shift approach, with a clear view of costs, needs and risks. It knows what the expected benefits of the cloud migration will be, including improved scalability, application resiliency, better business processes, huge cost savings and a massively reduced workload for the IT team.
The nonprofit can now kick off the migration of its SAP environment to AWS knowing that it’s the right choice for them and with a clear plan to follow. SoftwareOne will support the team throughout the migration, ensuring the customer can focus on its core mission: helping small local businesses and the broader community grow sustainably.
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We are ready to lend you a hand with SAP
Wherever you are in your SAP journey, SoftwareOne has solved many of the problems you may face. Tell us about your business challenge, and we’ll get right back to you.
We are ready to lend you a hand with SAP
Wherever you are in your SAP journey, SoftwareOne has solved many of the problems you may face. Tell us about your business challenge, and we’ll get right back to you.