Business opportunity

One leading advanced materials and semiconductor solutions supplier runs factories, laboratories and administrative offices in 10 countries across three continents. Its employees rely heavily on SAP ERP software to manage the supply chain, from sourcing raw materials to billing clients.

With its SAP landscape hosted on its long-time cloud provider, the company was facing a 2X rise in hosting fees. To avoid the unsustainably high-cost increase, the company needed to migrate to a more affordable hyperscaler cloud in just four months. Migration also offered an opportunity to improve performance and availability and strengthen its security posture, while preparing for a future upgrade to SAP S/4HANA.

Technical challenge

Maintaining business processes without disruption is crucial for this manufacturer. While basic business activities can continue, any lack of access to SAP systems can significantly impact plant transactions, delivery and vendor invoicing, which can have costly financial consequences. This made it vital to plan and execute the migration of the 92-server landscape with minimum impact to business.

As part of the project, the company aimed to resolve suboptimal configurations in the existing SAP landscape, including the arrangements around high availability. It also wanted to shrink the landscape by archiving old data and optimize the new architecture in preparation for their migration to RISE with SAP and S/4HANA. During the change, the company wanted to introduce additional threat detection capabilities and proactive monitoring.

Our solution

Together, the company and Kyndryl migrated the existing SAP landscape to Amazon Web Services (AWS) within the four-month deadline.

Following the company’s previous provider-agnostic model, Kyndryl worked quickly to actively design multiple options for different hyperscalers and contract periods. Based on Kyndryl's recommendations, the manufacturing company opted for the proposed three-year contract with AWS to optimize costs.

The Kyndryl team worked closely with the IT team, agreeing on planned downtime and minimized disruption to plants during the migration. Kyndryl then configured larger HANA database environments, improved the automation of failovers and failbacks in clusters, laid the foundation for Near-Zero Downtime (NZDT) OS patching and continued to deliver managed services and support for SAP.

Kyndryl’s comprehensive approach provides the company with Managed Application Services to optimize SAP system performance, ensuring compliance and streamlining business operations.

In addition, Kyndryl collaborated with the client to strengthen the security posture of their AWS environment by enhancing threat detection capabilities and implementing proactive monitoring measures. The Kyndryl Security Operations as a Platform (SOaaP) service is a cloud-based, remotely managed solution that delivers comprehensive support for the management of security operations infrastructure, tools, and processes. The solutions include Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR), Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR), and Vulnerability Management. The service also provides access to a curated library of Kyndryl-developed SIEM use cases and SOAR playbooks to support rapid and effective incident response. Kyndryl Cybersecurity Incident Response and Forensic (CSIRF) services will assist the company to respond to security incidents occurring against its information systems, networks and related infrastructure. The solution also includes implementing Immutable and an Air Gapped (logical) Backup Storage solution in AWS to protect their backups.

The power of partnership

Kyndryl worked in tight collaboration with AWS platform experts to validate the planned architecture and iron out technical issues. Across three time zones, the partners ensured a smooth handover between teams to provide round-the-clock coverage for the customer during this business-critical migration.