DRIVING INNOVATION AND BUSINESS VALUE WITH SAP® APPLICATIONS ON 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 and the 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 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 AAON EB SERVIES

REGION A REGION A

A A A A

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.

AENTURE LOUDSUITE OR SA ON AS

B R A A A S SAP B I A A I I O M

Figure 2. Accenture CloudSuite for SAP

The impact? Using a single self-service customer interface with automated build and run of SAP applications can reduce the cost of SAP projects by lowering the third-party deployment cost and decreasing the need for manual labor in operations.

10 DRIVING INNOVATION AND BUSINESS VALUE WITH SAP® APPLICATIONS ON AMAZON WEB SERVICES Keeping your finger on the pulse of new developments: Easy access to cutting-edge technologies

The real value of migrating to cloud is not the “lift and shift” aspect. Moving to AWS makes it easier and faster to augment and enhance SAP environments with new technology innovation.

How? By leveraging native AWS services When customers purchase on-premises for blockchain, artificial intelligence, hardware, their technology is essentially machine learning, IoT or predictive frozen in time, because they tend to use analytics and integrating them with your those systems for the next three to five existing SAP environment or by deploying years. It’s rare for companies to replace SAP Cloud Platform (SCP) on AWS. SCP infrastructure prematurely, because it is an open platform-as-a-service offering requires such substantial investments. from SAP that provides database and By contrast, AWS constantly releases business application services to digital new instance types, services or enterprises. SAP Cloud Platform is features that customers can start using available in seven AWS regions around immediately. For example, AWS’s latest the globe, and companies can manage instances have nitro technology5, which it neatly alongside their primary SAP provides better performance at lower environments in AWS. cost. Either way, organizations can take On top of that, switching to AWS advantage of a fast pace of innovation enables companies to take advantage on AWS compared to traditional of infrastructure advancements in on‑premises architectures. a way that on-premises environments usually can’t rival.

11 DRIVING INNOVATION AND BUSINESS VALUE WITH SAP® APPLICATIONS ON AMAZON WEB SERVICES Adapting to fit: Seamless scalability

Of course, any company thinking of moving mission-critical SAP solutions to the cloud will want to know that they can scale as they grow. AWS offers true peace of mind in this area.

AWS supports larger SAP installations This means AWS is now an attractive than ever before, thanks to its recently option for enterprises, which announced Amazon EC2 High Memory typically need very large SAP HANA Instances6. Whereas previously the deployments. For example, Japanese virtual machines (VMs) for SAP HANA clothing business Fast Retailing (better were limited to 2 TB or 4 TB for scale-up known as UNIQLO) was one of the first workloads, AWS now offers Amazon EC2 customers to use Amazon EC2 High High Memory Instances, purpose-built Memory Instances9 to support its SAP for SAP HANA, that support memory Fashion Management solution as the sizes of 6, 9 or 12 TB on bare metal business achieves substantial growth10. for scale-up deployments7. In addition, AWS has already announced plans AWS recently announced support for to launch 18 TB and 24 TB scale-up scale-out clusters up to 48 TB for SAP instances later this year11. S/4HANA-based online transactional (OLTP) SAP workloads8, and it has supported scale-out up to 50 TB for SAP workloads based on online analytical processing (OLAP) since 2017.

12 DRIVING INNOVATION AND BUSINESS VALUE WITH SAP® APPLICATIONS ON AMAZON WEB SERVICES Finding the right balance: Minimizing latency while observing data sovereignty

Organizations put a great deal of careful consideration into where they host their data – and with good reason.

For starters, data-center location is To reduce costs, most organizations important in helping companies adhere using on-premises infrastructure or to rules around data sovereignty. private clouds limit themselves to two For example, they may need to store data centers to run their regional and certain data within particular national global systems. This approach makes boundaries or within a broader territory it hard to keep latency and response such as the European Union. times low for remote users. AWS’s global Regions enable customers to In addition, although network speeds host their SAP systems closest to their are close to the speed of light, latency customer base, helping them minimize issues can occur if network traffic needs latency and meet requirements for data to travel a long way. For example, sovereignty. For example, customers if a user in Japan is accessing data can run global systems near large user or a system hosted in Europe, he or bases, but there’s nothing to stop them she may experience slight delays. from running regional systems from If application response times become data centers that are closer to the users. sluggish, user productivity starts The result? Companies can reduce to decline. latency and accelerate application Setting up and maintaining response times – fostering greater user data centers is expensive. productivity – while choosing where data resides so they comply with data sovereignty regulations.

13 DRIVING INNOVATION AND BUSINESS VALUE WITH SAP® APPLICATIONS ON AMAZON WEB SERVICES Making the switch: Smooth migration

By this point, you can see how moving your SAP landscape to the cloud can help you cut costs, boost availability, increase security, save time, and more. How do you make the switch without disrupting the business users who depend on the systems?

Accenture AWS Business Group (AABG) • Virtual-to-virtual migrations: is here to help. AABG brings together solutions to help companies migrate the best of AWS and Accenture to from virtualized on‑premises accelerate enterprise adoption of AWS infrastructures to AWS. and business value creation. What’s • Server migration service (SMS) more, it has a history of success in that enables companies running transforming and migrating large-scale VMware‑based environments enterprise application environments. to replicate their environments AABG offers a number of mechanisms directly into AWS. to help companies transition smoothly Heterogeneous migration to cloud, with different tools catering (in which the operating system to different source systems: or database changes): Homogeneous SAP migrations • SAP heterogeneous system (in which the operating system copy, potentially with options and database remain the same): that minimize downtime, such • Physical-to-virtual migrations: as SAP nZDT or Shareplex. tools to help organizations shift • SAP Database Migration from on‑premises physical Option for migrations to hardware to AWS. SAP HANA and Sybase.

14 DRIVING INNOVATION AND BUSINESS VALUE WITH SAP® APPLICATIONS ON AMAZON WEB SERVICES For example, Accenture recently helped Crucially too, by giving Del Monte Foods Del Monte Foods migrate 200 servers the opportunity to explore the latest – including 82 machines dedicated to cloud native capabilities on AWS, the SAP – to AWS with minimal impact on migration has opened the door to new commercial operations. The end‑to‑end insights into performance and spending migration took 3.5 months, and business from advanced analytics, as well as users didn’t even notice the cutover providing a firm foundation for future for the production environment, innovation. This is where the true value which took place over a weekend. of any migration to AWS is to be found. The results? Del Monte Foods accelerated infrastructure provisioning from weeks to under 60 minutes, improved stability, cut costs and ramped up business agility12.

15 DRIVING INNOVATION AND BUSINESS VALUE WITH SAP® APPLICATIONS ON AMAZON WEB SERVICES Get in touch

We’ve seen that Accenture is well-positioned to help large enterprises run their SAP applications efficiently in the AWS Cloud – offering rock-solid reliability, high performance, robust security and more.

In fact, in most cases the offering Ready to get started? from Accenture and AWS is more Contact us and we’ll be happy to efficient and effective for companies help you start unlocking the benefits than hosting applications internally, of cloud in your SAP landscape. as Accenture and AWS’s powerful economies of scale mean that investments are divided between thousands of customers.

About the authors

Steve Deliën Rahul Kabra Accenture Chief Technology Architect, Partner Solutions Architect, SAP Journey to Cloud SAP Amazon Web Services Accenture [email protected] [email protected]

16 DRIVING INNOVATION AND BUSINESS VALUE WITH SAP® APPLICATIONS ON AMAZON WEB SERVICES References

1 https://www.accenture.com/us-en/insights/ 7 https://www.businesswire.com/news/ technology/technology-trends-2019 home/20180927005961/en/AWS-Announces-New- Amazon-EC2-High-Memory 2 https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global- infrastructure/ 8 https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/awsforsap/ announcing-support-for-extremely-large-s-4hana- 3 https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global- deployments-on-aws/ infrastructure/ 9 4 https://www.sap.com/dmc/exp/2014-09-02-hana- https://www.businesswire.com/news/ hardware/enEN/iaas.html#categories=Amazon%20 home/20180927005961/en/AWS-Announces-New- Web%20Services Amazon-EC2-High-Memory 10 5 https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-ec2- https://www.fastretailing.com/eng/about/ update-additional-instance-types-nitro-system-and- business/aboutfr.html cpu-options 11 https://awsinsider.net/articles/2018/10/01/high- memory-hana.aspx 6 https://www.businesswire.com/news/ home/20180927005961/en/AWS-Announces-New- 12 https://www.accenture.com/us-en/case- Amazon-EC2-High-Memory studies/cloud/success-del-monte-infrastructure- transformation

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