SAP systems in the AWS Cloud on demand

The Ratingen-based environmental services company Befesa was faced with the challenge of making its existing SAP system available in the cloud at low cost in order to fulfil all audit requirements. In collaboration with SPIRIT/21, a customised concept was developed based on various AWS services. This solution was designed to be secure, efficient and on-demand to provide Befesa with a flexible and reliable deployment of their SAP systems.

The challenge of migrating SAP systems

Following a system change, the Befesa Group was faced with the challenge of making its previous SAP system available for another ten years in a cost-effective solution for evaluation and auditing purposes and to fulfil the statutory retention periods. As an experienced, certified cloud and SAP Managed Services provider, SPIRIT/21 was able to offer a secure, efficient and simple on-demand cloud solution. Amazon Web Services provided the ideal platform for this. The integration of AWS services into the automation and operating elements of SPIRIT/21 ensured that the environment was provided quickly and cost-effectively. Today, all important steps in operation are automated - making them highly efficient and less prone to errors.

Implementation of the on-demand solution in the AWS Cloud

After the automated AWS account setup, the SAP ECC 6.0 EHP 7 system was migrated to the AWS cloud environment on the basis of a current and supported SUSE Linux Enterprise for SAP with an Oracle database. It was important to ensure the audit compliance of the SAP data for audits by the tax authorities. The SAP-certified EC2 instance was network-isolated in a VPC solution (‘virtual private cloud’) for this purpose. Access can only be established via a secure connection, ‘secure by design’.

The migrated SAP system is made available ‘on-demand’. Using a simple trigger solution, the SAP system can even be started automatically from the Office applications. The service is available within a few minutes. At the end of the working day, the system shuts down again automatically. The automated shutdown of the solution minimises operating costs and maximises security. In addition, an automated reporting service was implemented with Cloud-Watch to warn of unplanned costs.

Result

With this platform, SPIRIT/21 offers a secure, cost-effective and HGB-compliant solution for the Befesa Group’s SAP archive system. Together with AWS, the monthly operating costs were significantly reduced through intuitive and highly automated on-demand cloud services.

This SAP on-demand cloud solution is also predestined for temporarily required SAP systems in the cloud and can be adapted to test, demo, training, sandbox, PoC systems, SAP Model Company systems or entire SAP development landscapes in a cost-effective and secure manner. SPIRIT/21 offers this as a best practice solution. And the combination of SPIRIT/21 Cloud and SAP Managed Services provides customers with a complete solution from a single source.