SAP systems in the AWS Cloud
The Befesa Group is a service company specializing in the recycling of steel mill dust and aluminium residues as well as related logistics and other related industrial services. Its activities are divided into two business areas: Steel Mill Dust Recycling Services and Aluminum Salt Slag Recycling Services.
Challenge
Following a system change, the Befesa Group was faced with the challenge of making its previous SAP system available in a cost-effective solution for another 10 years for evaluation and auditing purposes and to meet legal retention periods. As an experienced and certified cloud and SAP managed service provider, SPIRIT/21 was able to offer a secure, efficient and simple on-demand cloud solution. With its holistic approach, SPIRIT/21 convinced the customer to choose a solution from Amazon Web Services. Amazon Web Services represented the optimal platform for the solution for Befesa and SPIRIT/21. The integration of AWS services into the automation and operating elements of SPIRIT/21 ensured fast and efficient provisioning of the environment. During operation, all important steps are now automated, making them highly efficient and less prone to errors.
Implementation
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 auditability of the SAP data for audits by the tax authorities. The SAP-certified EC2 instance was network-isolated in a VPC (“virtual private cloud”) solution for this purpose. Access can only be established via a secure connection, secure by design.
The migrated SAP system is made available when it is needed. Using a simple trigger solution, the Befesa financial accounting team can even start the SAP system 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 minimizes operating costs and maximizes security. In addition, an automated reporting service was implemented with Cloud Watch to warn of unplanned costs.
Results
With this platform, SPIRIT/21 offers a secure, cost-effective and HGB-compliant solution for the Befesa Group’s old 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. The SPIRIT/21 team of experts will be happy to answer any questions you may have on this topic:
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Beatrix Böhm
SAP Senior-Beraterin Finanzwesen und Berechtigungen
Phone: +49 172 631 6153
E-Mail: bboehm@spirit21.com
Beatrix is a consultant and project manager in the areas of finance and authorisation management as well as information lifecycle management and upgrade and Greenfield+ projects.
