Banking on the Cloud to support Brazilian Entrepreneurs

Coping with an outdated SAP system

With more than 5 million members across the country, the nonprofit organization offers millions of people and businesses a wide range of services and products to manage their financial affairs – from banking to loans, investments, and insurance. It has a vision to provide sustainable growth for the whole of society, particularly supporting overlooked entrepreneurs, rural producers, and social projects in disadvantaged and rural communities.

However, to serve these customers often based in remote locations, the organization needed innovative online financial solutions. It had developed a series of digital products on AWS cloud, like mobile banking apps and online credit card services. But the underlying corporate IT environment consisted of disparate legacy IT systems and outdated applications. Its on-premises virtualized SAP infrastructure was complex, inflexible, and had poor scalability and little application resiliency. The organization’s small IT team struggled to cope with an SAP operating system that was running out of support, coupled with growing administrative overheads and ever-increasing hardware costs.

The team knew it could achieve better outcomes and provide better value to its cooperative members if it used AWS cloud technology. But without the in-house expertise to move its legacy data center cost-effectively to the cloud, it turned to SoftwareOne for guidance.

A comprehensive assessment with SoftwareOne

SoftwareOne conducted an SAP on AWS Assessment, with funding support from Amazon Web Services. As a certified AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) Partner for SAP, SoftwareOne applied its skills and experience to assess the nonprofit’s IT infrastructure to define a clear strategy and road map to move its substantial SAP workload to the AWS cloud.

Taking existing functionalities plus business and IT requirements into account, SoftwareOne recommended a lift-and-shift migration to move the SAP workloads completely from on-premises to AWS. The SAP development and quality assurance systems would be moved first, followed by the SAP production system. SoftwareOne defined the potential migration architecture, including high availability options, disaster recovery, and backup strategies. The plan set the migration timeline, future SAP landscape design, and estimates of AWS cloud consumption.