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High Tech
High Tech Solutions to Drive Business Transformation through Technology
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Google Cloud
TCS-Google Cloud: Driving Innovation and Digital Transformation
Highlights
- SAP wanted to modernize its legacy on-prem infrastructure to become an agile and digital organization.
- TCS collaborated with SAP on its transformation journey by using cloud as the unifying digital fabric for long-term benefits.
- TCS’ solution helped SAP create, deploy, automate, and enhance change management tools to improve productivity, simplify operations, and deliver compliance benefits.
In this article
Overview
SAP wanted to transform its digital landscape and adopt cloud to optimize its operations and streamline the delivery of ERP products.
The German software maker decided to migrate its on-premises infrastructure to Google Cloud to ensure business agility. It thus reached out to TCS, its strategic partner for about two decades, to support SAP’s business operations, application administration, database management, operating systems management, and data management during this migration.
Challenge
SAP had to migrate over 8,000 virtual machines to Google Cloud in a phased manner.
To implement this migration, SAP needed to address the following aspects:
Shortage of resources: SAP had an extensive and diverse hardware resources managed within its enterprise environment. The demand was not being met with the existing hardware due to the migration.
Need for optimization: SAP’s expected efficiencies and savings were not realized during the migration’s initial phase.
Compliance and security concerns: While one of the primary objectives was to migrate to Google Cloud, ensuring a zero-trust architecture required time and resources.
Solution
TCS, a long-standing partner with deep contextual knowledge, collaborated with SAP to create an automated, scalable, and flexible cloud optimization solution leading to effective change management.
This collaboration resulted in a two-phased approach that accelerated the transformation on to Google Cloud, enabling the client to harness its scalability and flexibility.
The two-phased approach was a combination of quick fixes to solve immediate issues as well as long term solutions that would reap sustainable benefits with the combined power of cloud and automation year on year.
In the first phase, TCS identified areas that needed immediate hardware resource optimization to streamline the migration to Google Cloud. This was done by immediate downsizing of hosts where utilization was minimal to low.
In phase two, TCS collaborated with the client to identify sustainable and long-term solutions that would enable it to optimize operations and improve development with minimal effort. SAP benefited with:
Tailor-made optimization- With migration to Google Cloud, it became crucial to ensure resource utilization was optimized to run SAP’s enterprise applications. In addition, it was essential to align system usage along with the development lifecycle. This was done through the following:
Autonomous usage-based system scaling: TCS along with SAP developed a calculation engine that regularly monitors system usage data for each host. This customized automation solution also monitored application usage and was able to dynamically resize system resources creating an elastic infrastructure without compromising performance.
Dynamic need-based system provisioning: A methodology was devised to use systems only in accordance with the development lifecycle. A dashboard was developed which allowed to enable a system when required for any emergency reason.
Effective change management: TCS collaborated with SAP SE to identify major repetitive tasks that are essential for maintaining infrastructure security and keeping systems updated. These tasks involved multiple steps, including application-related actions, making manual execution which was time-consuming and error-prone. To address this, TCS, along with SAP, developed a change management dashboard that allows scheduling and automation of these tasks.
Unified portal for change management: The infrastructure change management dashboard is a unified portal that consolidates essential features for handling tasks, resizing, load balancing, and reporting to one centralized location.
Outcomes
TCS collaborated with SAP to reimagine its enterprise technology landscape by creating an agile and resilient unified portal.
TCS’ long-standing partnership with SAP, deep domain experience, and contextual knowledge enabled SAP SE to achieve:
Enhanced application performance and reliability: The implemented solutions have led to improved performance and reliability of applications, ensuring seamless operations and minimizing downtime.
Streamlined operations: Automation has significantly reduced manual effort and mitigated the risk of errors in application management, resulting in more efficient and reliable operations.
Elevated compliance and security: Automated processes and standardized procedures have bolstered compliance measures and fortified the security posture of systems, ensuring adherence to regulatory standards and protecting against potential threats.
Substantial cost reduction: With optimized resource utilization, SAP was able to reduce expenses by about 3 million euros in a year.
SAP’s core development units could maintain an increased productivity with the help of TCS’s pro-active, reliable, and innovative managed services based on a long lasting, trustful partnership. This led to a deep understanding of SAP’s developer needs by TCS.”
