DELIVERING A

DELIVERING A SEAMLESS MIGRATION OF SAP TO AZURE

Cloud4C highlights its strong credentials to help customers move SAP workloads to Azure

As the move to cloud has become more popular in the enterprise segment owing to the great advantages it offers, Cloud4C held a webinar that discussed at length how Cloud4C can help customers move SAP workloads to Azure. The presenters of the day included Karim Kallawi, EVP, Alliance, Cloud4C; Ravi Tank, VP, CSP, Cloud 4C and Aseem Gupta, head, SAP Services Sales, Cloud 4C who delivered detailed presentations covering various facets of the expertise offered by Cloud 4C in taking customers through the migration journey of moving SAP workloads onto Azure.

The agenda of the day included giving an overview of Cloud4c’s Cloud Adoption Framework and taking the attendees through the three-stage approach that Cloud4C follows for moving SAP onto Azure. The sessions also provided insights into security & compliances on Azure as well as Data Localization Solution on Azure and detailing Cloud 4C’s SAP Services Portfolio. The session was attended by a number of senior IT leaders from different verticals. A Q&A session helped bring up the finale to the event.

Karim Kallawi, EVP, Alliance, Cloud 4C gave a brief overview of the credentials of Cloud4C with building solutions for SAP on Azure.

He said, “Cloud4C is a born in the cloud partner. As part of larger group which started off in the datacenter space, Cloud4C was built as a subsidiary providing managed services in the cloud. Our specialized expertise includes SAP on cloud services and SAP on Azure is a part of this focus.”

“We are managing more than 40,000 VMs, managing over 2000 TB of data for SAP HANA and we have delivered over 1 billion hours of managed services. This has been delivered through a team of over 1800 cloud experts. Our service delivery is based out of India with local presence in markets we address. In MEA, Dubai is the HQ and have satellite offices in KSA and Qatar, BDM coverage in Bahrain.”

As a leading services provider in the industry, Cloud4C has many certifications and industry specializations.

Elaborating further on these, Karim added, “Among the badges we are most honored to wear is that of Microsoft Azure Expert MSP. The process is complex and requires you to prove to a third-party auditor that you can deliver what you claim to be capable of. We achieved this certification in 2019 and renewed it this year as it is an ongoing certification.” Karim Kallawi EVP, Alliance, Cloud 4C

Cloud4C decided to go beyond this and prove itself in other areas as well, focusing on specific skillsets.

“In terms of Microsoft Cloud, we are expert Migration partners and have achieved advanced certification for Windows and SQL migration. We are just about to be audited for the Linux specialization. More importantly, we have recently achieved the SAP on Azure advanced specialization.”

For Cloud4C customers, it means they can be assured of an end to end cloud lifecycle management with very in-depth technical expertise. Cloud4C delivers this through a team as big as 670 Azure certified experts. Recognizing Cloud4C’s capability in migrating to the cloud, Microsoft awarded it as partner of the year for Qatar last year.

Ravi Tank, VP, CSP, Cloud4C gave a detailed presentation, covering covered many aspects of the migration and implementation journey. Below is a summary of his talk under various sub-topics:

Ravi Tank VP, CSP, Cloud4C

SAP WORKLOAD MIGRATION ROADMAP What are the things one should be looking at and how Cloud4C can help you take SAP and non-SAP workloads into Azure? “The first step we recommend is you should move the SAP and non-SAP workloads onto Azure with a lift and shift methodology. You can do some kind of enhancement in this stage but not complete transformation. In stage 2, we encourage you to convert the SAP and non-SAP workloads into microservices and start using SaaS and PaaS platforms on Azure. In the 3rd stage, we will be deploying a Big Data platform and integrating it with IoT, Machine Learning and other data services. We recommend this 3-phase approach to any of our partners and customers.”

Discussing the journey of moving SAP to Azure in 7 steps in stage 1, he elaborates “First you should be preparing a Cloud Adoption framework which focuses on doing the right assessment for your current infrastructure. In the second stage, within the same framework, you should do an assessment of your SAP workloads- you should understand SAP Technical modules, understand modules and dependencies etc. Since you have deployed these workloads on premise over a period of times, if the dependencies aren’t understood well, the migration may not be successful. The third stage in the journey is creating an understanding of the strategy, defining the scenarios of migration, mapping the likely outcomes and acceptance criteria. The testing of your workloads on Azure is very important. You need to ensure that whatever mapping you are doing is as per approved Microsoft Notes and SAP Best practices.”

“In the fourth stage you should be looking at preparing a robust landing zone, where you look at aspects like deploying the policy as per the original SOP (standard operating procedures), availability & SLA, security & compliance as well as governance. Then you take your workload onto Azure through either the lift & shift approach, re-deployment or if you are running on a non-intel platform, through a re-platforming strategy. All these are decided during the early stages when we are doing the assessment and creating the blueprint. Then you enforce the governance check and be sure that whatever you have migrated has no other impact like on costs, security baseline etc. The last part is innovation wherein once you are on the cloud, you can start adopting the microservices and others such as Big Data platform, DevOps etc.”

CLOUD4C DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION FRAMEWORK Cloud4C helps customers adopt the cloud with the right strategies and for this, offers a program covering four areas. The first is Infrastructure modernization, followed by application modernization, database modernization and then workplace modernization. How Cloud4C helps organizations reach into the digital age is part of the third stage of innovation.

Once customers have migrated to the cloud, Cloud4C can help them through its managed services based on Site Reliability Engineering. As part of this, the first part is AI OPs.

Cloud4C has 22 centres of excellence focusing in well architected Best practices and operations management. They try and automate as many repetitive tasks as possible from SLA point, agility and automation points of view. This is how Coud 4C handholds organizations through their digital transformation journeys.

CLOUD ADOPTION FRAMEWORK Cloud4C has created a robust framework through which it helps organizations create migration blueprints and migrate to the cloud. There are three stages part of this.

According to Ravi, “The first stage is Strategy and Planning where understand the vision, motivations, outcomes expected. Based on that we do an assessment of their current workload deployments. In Stage 2, which is the Readiness stage, we create the Migration blueprint. We identify the gaps, define the to be and as is landscape. Based on the analysis, we come up with recommendation as to whether have a lift & shift, redeployment or a re-platforming approach. The third stage is where we do the migration of the workloads, do the governance check and make it ready for innovation.”

SAP ON AZURE ASSESSMENT Cloud 4C offers a 5-day workshop ‘SAP on Azure assessment’. This is based on the CAF framework (Cloud Assessment Framework) wherein Cloud4C gets a complete understanding of the complete posture of the client’s SAP landscape on premise and then come up with the right migration blueprint along with the TCO and ROI samples.

SAP and non-SAP workloads with a dependence on SAP.” Cloud4C has also developed a data localization framework. This is important for BFSI but even so, regulators are looking for some sort of data localization requirements being met by all industries.

BUILDING ON THE ADVANTAGES Aseem Gupta, head, SAP Services Sales, Cloud4C during his presentation, explained the advantages of looking at Cloud4C for SAP services.

“We have extensive application-based services and enterprise services we have built on top our key capabilities on cloud. We have over 200 customers across 25 countries using that kind of platform across various cloud platforms and majority of them are on Azure. Over the past one year of portfolio development we have taken a step further, focusing on our strength of automation and created an end to end enterprise services portfolio for SAP customers.”

The value propositions Cloud4C offer under this can be divided into four: • A full stack automation of SAP Landscape. • Implementation and migration with Devops. • Application management • Automated Business operations.

“We offer a full stack automation of SAP Landscape, offering SAP Managed services on Azure. We have taken the concept of automation and DevOps further and started investing into Implementation and Migration factories. This mean we have created a center of excellence and factory-based approach, based out of our HQ in Hyderabad, India, with sales and pre-sales teams in various countries. We have heavily invested in relevant proprietary tools and external tools to give the complete flavor of migration factory approach to our customers, who want to migrate from ECC to SAP S/4HANA including upgrades, Unicode conversion, platform migration, everything included in a comprehensive way. That allows us to pass on the benefits of a faster implementation that is faster by approximately 50%. It is much cheaper because we use lesser number of resources.”

“The whole change management process is automated. Testing is automated to a large extent, mostly in the regression testing phase. We have a shared resources delivery model. This is in partnership with some of the global SAP partners, with the biggest one being SNP.”

For implementation, it follows a similar methodology. There is a roadmap it has created to cover all SAP products as part of this automated migration and implementation.

“Application Management services is built on similar lines. We call it AI Operations based Application Management Services. This is a highly automated practice where human intervention is reduced to maximum possible extent. We continue to improve upon that and pass on the quality benefits of automating application management services. Finally, there is Automated Business operations, wherein it is concerned with Business process automation, leveraging the Aseem Gupta Head, SAP Services Sales

SAP IRPA product, and trying to automate all key Business processes across all departments.”

Cloud4C’s end to end SAP services are offered with the lowest cost and fastest delivery-based approach. Whether, it is infrastructure or Business process, its covers it all with respect to automation for SAP.

Cloud4C has predefined ECC to SAP/4 HANA Migration based on a ‘T-shirt’ scale size, from small to medium to large, depending on various factors including complexity of systems landscapes, starting from data size, number of simplifications required based on modules customers have implemented etc.

Cloud4C has been a pioneer in the managed service space, predominantly technical managed services. It has taken a step further to cover the functional and Application support as well. Cloud4C uses the SAP intelligent RPA for RPA deployments.

“Cloud4C has defined T-Shirt size packages, of fixed scope, fixed price and fixed timelines, catering to a range starting from 1 department and 3 processes to covering as many as 50 processes across all departments. Depending on the number of processes to be automated, there is a feasibility study and demo, which is free of cost. Only when the customer is happy with the demo, we move on to a paid implementation service. That is quite a cost-effective package. “

In addition, Cloud4C has launched a switch to cloud package to accelerate the customer adoption of SAP S4/HANA on cloud. This includes SAP Managed Services, S4/HANA transformations and SAP Application Management including Business process automation, all together for customers who are still on ECC and looking to migrate to cloud and S/4 HANA.