Ukraine’s DTEK completes SAP migration to AWS

DTEK migrates to address business risk and improve resilience

DTEK’s migration plans came to a temporary halt after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. The company needed to respond by making sure that critical services were stabilised. In the first instance, Modus X helped DTEK revive its migration plans, because modernising its SAP infrastructure was vital for the organisation’s resilience and long-term growth. DTEK and Modus X – an IT services provider that had originally been established to support DTEK’s digital transformation goals – began working on the migration project together with SoftwareOne and AWS.

Multiple teams work across 10+ workstreams to plan complex migration

SoftwareOne began by assessing DTEK’s SAP infrastructure with support from the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP), which provided funding for the project. After the assessment was completed, multiple teams that included experts from Modus X, SoftwareOne and AWS began the design phase, which proved to be the most complex part of the project. The trio was looking to drive innovation for DTEK, not simply perform a migration.

Teams worked across more than 10 workstreams, including development of an AWS Landing Zone, SAP migration, VMware Cloud configuration, security and more. Each workstream had dedicated leaders from both Modus X and SoftwareOne collaborating virtually using Microsoft Teams, with teams located in Ukraine, Bulgaria, Poland, and the UK, meeting weekly to keep their efforts aligned and synchronised.

During the design phase, DTEK focused on areas including data protection and data residency, which was necessary for compliance requirements. This supported DTEK’s commitment to robust data security and complying with regulations. DTEK also used AWS Identity and Access Management and AWS IAM Identity Centre to ensure that only authorised employees could access critical systems, while IAM Roles Anywhere made it possible to securely manage access to AWS resources from external environments.

SoftwareOne provided critical support by developing and deploying the AWS Cloud infrastructure for DTEK, and Modus X provided the foundation for establishing a landing zone and centralised account management on AWS. SoftwareOne also helped to structure AWS accounts so DTEK could deploy resilient workloads, manage billing and ensure security compliance.

SoftwareOne worked to implement a network services infrastructure so DTEK could implement the same security approaches it was using before the migration project. This helped to deliver a seamless experience when managing network traffic after the migration.

While designing the migration plans for DTEK, the teams also focused on enhancing resilience, reliability and fault tolerance by configuring the primary SAP environment across three AWS Availability Zones. This ensured seamless operations for DTEK, which had previously lacked such disaster recovery and continuity capabilities.

In addition to developing the proof of concept, setting up the landing zone and configuring security and infrastructure, SoftwareOne also managed the migration itself using advanced migration tools. The migration proceeded rapidly and with little to no downtime, thanks to thorough preparation and strong collaboration across all the teams.