Maximize your value when running SAP on Microsoft Azure

We've a long-standing relationship with a large financial institution. They already have our products. We've been working with them for a good number of years. It's been a Group approach, so it's not just ourselves, but also with our sister companies. They had a problem. They wanted to move away from their internal IT. They wanted to move to a cloud environment. They had unpredictable outages on their on-premise environment. The general frustration was that they felt there are now Software-as-a-Service solutions on the market. There must be a way that they can move their HCM and Payroll out of a traditional on-premise IT environment into a cloud service. So not just migrating it to the cloud, having it run as a service with a partner. As a group of companies, we provide managed payroll solutions, we do cloud migration, and we use a lot of our software that we develop for that purpose. So we're a good fit for that journey. It is a large financial institution; security is an issue and as an approach to services engagement, it's one of the first that they did. So we started the project and it became apparent that the appetite for security risk really was very different after moving from on-premise. Most organisations have some sort of identity management. So whenever you connect to a service, there is a username, there is a password. Most organisations have an internal, infrastructure-based identity management solution. Often these systems contain more than just credentials. Usernames, passwords. A lot of these systems represent internal organisational structures, permissions, access to software and services that you've got. So they are actually much more than just there for logging and as a result they're quite a key component that needs to be protected. In this scenario we were moving their SAP systems which were very tightly coupled to the identity management platform. Moving them out meant that we still needed access to those core systems and the company decided that they were not happy with giving us access. Which makes sense, but these SAP systems are intrinsically hardwired into this management platform. And so you then have to go through all the servers, all the systems, how they're configured, and whether they can use an alternative method. And so we had to overhaul their SAP configuration during the migration to completely remove their ability to talk to their identity management platform that they have currently and use different ones. We succeeded in migrating their on-premise Payroll to Azure. We've wrapped it in a managed service solution so they don't have to worry about the infrastructure, the IT, Basis work, and they continue to have access and control over their environment. It's a good hybrid solution.