DRIVING INNOVATION AND BUSINESS VALUE WITH SAP® APPLICATIONS ON AMAZON WEB SERVICES Introduction
To sharpen their competitive edge and generate new business value with relevant, differentiated products and services, organizations need to innovate faster.
To achieve that goal, they’re turning To boost their agility, many to emerging technologies such as companies are seeking to move AI, blockchain, advanced analytics their SAP applications to the cloud and the Internet of Things (IoT). In to take advantage of greater flexibility. fact, in the Accenture Technology What’s more, the cloud model enables Vision 2019 survey of more than companies to lower capital outlay 6,600 business and IT executives, by swapping hefty upfront capital 94 percent of respondents said the investments for affordable monthly fees. pace of technology innovation in their But how do you know which cloud organizations had either accelerated provider and implementation partner or significantly accelerated over to choose? If you make the switch, the past three years1. will your business-critical SAP The challenge: How to achieve solutions remain up-and-running this innovation in mission-critical with low response times? How do environments like SAP® applications? you migrate your core enterprise Adapting at pace is tough. And applications without disrupting the flexibility can be particularly elusive business? And how does adoption for organizations running core of the cloud allow you to pivot to enterprise applications such as SAP new and emerging technologies? solutions in on-premises deployments, where making changes to the environment can take months.
2 DRIVING INNOVATION AND BUSINESS VALUE WITH SAP® APPLICATIONS ON AMAZON WEB SERVICES This paper outlines why Accenture and Amazon Web Services (AWS) together offer a compelling solution for optimizing SAP applications in the cloud. In particular, it explores the advantages around:
• Business resiliency • Scalability
• Security • Data sovereignty
• Lowering costs – including potential • Latency annual reduction in total cost of • Migration ownership (TCO) of up to 40 percent
• Access to cutting-edge automation technology
3 DRIVING INNOVATION AND BUSINESS VALUE WITH SAP® APPLICATIONS ON AMAZON WEB SERVICES Fully equipped: Business resiliency
When a company thinks about running its mission‑critical SAP workloads in the cloud, one of its top concerns will be business continuity. The level of business continuity determines whether the systems will remain up-and-running for the thousands of business users that rely on them every day.
Most organizations running on-premises AWS goes much further to infrastructures typically maintain two safeguard business resiliency. data centers. The primary data center hosts the primary and high-availability AWS global infrastructure is built (HA) environment, and the secondary around Regions and Availability data center hosts the passive disaster Zones (AZs). Each region is a separate recovery (DR) environment. Both geographical area and the regions are HA and DR are usually passive. made up of isolated locations known If the primary data center is hit by as AZs. Each region is completely a disaster – such as an electricity independent and all of the isolated outage, flooding or an earthquake – AZs in that region are connected the systems failover to the secondary through low-latency, high throughput, site. In many cases, the failover and highly redundant networking. is manual, and it could be hours, The following diagram2 illustrates the days or weeks before the company relationship between regions and AZs. can resume normal operations.
4 DRIVING INNOVATION AND BUSINESS VALUE WITH SAP® APPLICATIONS ON AMAZON WEB SERVICES A A ON EB SERVI ES
REGION A REGION A
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Figure 1. AWS global infrastructure
In addition, each AZ has its own discrete In the event that the primary uninterruptable power supply (UPS) and environment is no longer available, onsite backup generator facilities. The the DR environment can be rapidly power supplies are each fed via different resized to match the primary grids from independent utilities to further environment’s resources. Some reduce single points of failure (SPOFs). customers may have conservative All AZs are redundantly connected to recovery time objectives (the amount multiple tier-1 transit providers. The of downtime that can elapse without AWS Cloud spans 61 AZs within 20 affecting the business) and recovery geographic regions around the world3. point objectives (the age of files that must be recovered from backup for This set-up allows customers to deploy normal operations to resume after an SAP environments across multiple AZs outage). For these organizations, AWS improving resiliency. AWS also offers offers performance-optimized DR, in various options for DR. Customers which the DR environment is the same can opt for cost-optimized DR, which size as the primary environment. provides a smaller DR environment.
5 DRIVING INNOVATION AND BUSINESS VALUE WITH SAP® APPLICATIONS ON AMAZON WEB SERVICES Peace of mind: Resilient SAP architecture
AWS’s drive for business continuity isn’t limited to enhanced DR – it also includes eliminating application-level single points of failure (SPOFs). For SAP environments on AWS, that means protecting your database, central services and creating a robust architecture by leveraging multiple availability zones to avoid SPOFs.
AWS provides various native services These services provided to further enhance the resiliency of the by AWS make it easier for SAP architecture. For example, AWS customers to manage complex customers can take advantage of AWS Elastic File System (EFS), which delivers SAP environments and help a fully managed, secure, encrypted to reduce timelines and risks shared file system service that for SAP operations to enhance customers can use to mount between business continuity. SAP application servers and databases Today, AWS has more than on AWS. Because the EFS service is 50 instances certified to run SAP fully managed, this helps customers not solutions, including 18 instances have to worry about system outages. certified to run SAP HANA4. AWS also offers numerous services Customers running their SAP and features to simplify management landscapes on AWS can rest assured and operations of SAP solutions, that their mission‑critical systems including patching, management, are in good hands. Don’t just take backups of file systems, and taking our word for it – ask customers snapshots of entire instances to simplify running their SAP applications SAP system refresh processes. on AWS, such as Del Monte Foods.
6 DRIVING INNOVATION AND BUSINESS VALUE WITH SAP® APPLICATIONS ON AMAZON WEB SERVICES Protecting the business: Security
Maintaining rigorous security is in everyone’s interest, and in recognition of this, AWS provides various security services that customers can leverage to protect their data.
AWS’s shared security model provides Accenture assesses the organization’s security and protection of data up to requirements, delivers recommendations the operating-system level, including for minimum security, looks at how best everything from guest operating to meet those needs using AWS native system and hypervisor to the bottom and third-party services, and helps to of the stack, plus physical security ensure the customer is not exposed to of the data centers. known vulnerabilities or cyber threats. Together, Accenture and AWS deliver Accenture helps customers a comprehensive approach to security manage the security from the that goes beyond what is typically operating system all the way covered in infrastructure and SAP up into the SAP application application security. For example, and network. AWS offers SAP vulnerability management and SAP custom code scanning, as well as threat intelligence and forensics.
7 DRIVING INNOVATION AND BUSINESS VALUE WITH SAP® APPLICATIONS ON AMAZON WEB SERVICES Eyes on the bottom line: Cost efficiency
Shifting from an on-premises environment onto cloud can help to significantly reduce infrastructure costs.
In fact, Accenture and AWS have The result? They buy an infrastructure found that many companies moving that is oversized – and they pay for all their SAP landscapes to AWS Cloud can that capacity, whether or not they use it. cut TCO by between 20 and 40 percent. To understand this point, let’s first look at How can AWS help? the way companies purchase hardware Companies can pick and for on-premises deployment – and all choose the systems that fit the guesswork involved. their current workloads. If they Typically, companies buy infrastructure need to scale up and down, to last between three and five years, so they can switch to a larger whatever system they purchase needs or smaller environment in to be large enough to accommodate a couple of minutes. forecasted future growth. What’s more, they need to size for peaks in demand, With AWS, customers can now then add contingency. Companies tend build to the valleys instead of building to play it safe and overestimate capacity for the peaks. This not only helps requirements to reduce the risk of customers save costs, but also helps running out of space. them become more responsive to changing business needs.
8 DRIVING INNOVATION AND BUSINESS VALUE WITH SAP® APPLICATIONS ON AMAZON WEB SERVICES Making life easier: Shrinking the management overhead
Moving SAP applications to AWS helps save time for companies’ internal IT teams. Although on-premises technologies have evolved, only a limited percentage of everyday management tasks can be automated.
This is not the case with AWS. For customers running SAP applications, Because AWS offers API-driven Accenture and AWS have gone even services, most of the infrastructure- further and built CloudSuite for SAP – driven operation can be automated. a series of DevOps tools that automate Companies using AWS can write SAP deployments and operations their own scripts to handle regular on AWS. The suite comes with AWS operational tasks such as backups infrastructure plus blueprints and and refreshes for SAP environments. best practices for SAP architecture What’s more, scripts can be set to deployments, and includes popular perform the same activities across one SAP products. environment or many simultaneously.
9 DRIVING INNOVATION AND BUSINESS VALUE WITH SAP® APPLICATIONS ON AMAZON WEB SERVICES CloudSuite for SAP includes four solutions:
1. CloudBuilder for the deployment 3. CloudAdmin, which automates and testing of SAP workloads. SAP Basis activities including scripting underlying infrastructure 2. CloudRunner, which enables tasks, such as backups, restores, automated starts and stops for cloning, refreshes and applying non-production environments. operating system patches. For example, customers can configure the development 4. CloudMonitor, an SAP Solution instance of SAP S/4HANA® to Manager plug-in that provides shut down if no developers log end-to-end monitoring across on for 30 minutes, as well as for the whole stack – including scheduled up- and downtime. the SAP application. The tool is Production instances can auto- similarly integrated with Accenture scale to adjust capacity on-the-fly. myWizard® for SAP Operations.
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