SAP transformation to Microsoft Azure for leading financial organization

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.

The complexities of transforming to SAP HCM as a Service

This financial institution has been an EPI-USE Labs’ client for many years, and the two businesses have built a strong and trusting relationship. When the bank was faced with the complex task of future-proofing and modernising their SAP HCM business, they knew they could rely on advice from EPI-USE Labs. In light of the bank’s selected strategy to migrate to Microsoft Azure, challenges included:

right-sizing the footprint accurately in Microsoft Azure
understanding the detail of the bank’s infrastructure (the organisation has grown significantly, and has numerous teams)
the bank’s high level of governance and security
migrating to a hyperscaler with technology that was new and unfamiliar to the bank
optimising costs and modernising the landscape
maintaining data integrity and security.

An accelerated SAP migration

EPI-USE Labs provided our client with Software as a Service (SaaS). Subject matter experts in both SAP® migrations and Azure cloud architecture moved the bank’s SAP HCM landscape to Microsoft Azure (suite on HANA) successfully. They started with the ECC system, upgrading the bank from enhancement package 5 to 6, then 8, and performed a Unicode conversion, mainly in the HC space. The specialists used the accelerated SAP migration method, trimming down the landscape, refreshing it and completing the migration securely.

The team designed the landing zone in Azure from the ground up, which required a detailed knowledge of Azure, and integration and security to meet the bank’s requirements. This project took ten months and involved migrating 120 servers in total, reduced to 81 in Azure.

Excellent return on investment

This project went live in May 2021. Although it was a lengthy and challenging project to move to a large hyperscaler, EPI-USE Labs received positive feedback from the bank on its success. Systems in the landscape were migrated to newer operating systems and database versions, including the latest Microsoft Windows server, SUSE for SAP and SAP HANA applications.

EPI-USE Labs is also providing ongoing Managed Services for the whole landscape, from application layer support through to management on the OS/DB and infrastructure layer. The relationship of trust between the bank and EPI-USE Labs will remain crucial during this phase. Based on EPI-USE Labs’ involvement, the bank is now in a considerably better position to engage with third parties. The working relationship with Microsoft was also crucial to the success of this project.