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AWS and SAP: How and Why Companies
Run Regulated Workloads in the Cloud
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the cloud are realizing a range of significant benefits,
from more cost-effective uptime of mission critical
applications and the ease with which they adapt to
changing regulations, to more rigorous security and
greater business agility.
WHY AGILITY IS DRIVING
CLOUD MIGRATION
Some of the benefits of moving SAP to the AWS
cloud are variants on the gains companies realize
when they adopt cloud systems in other parts of
their businesses. On-premise SAP installations need
large internal teams, may take significant effort to
upgrade and are sized to support peak volumes,
resulting in day-to-day underuse of infrastructure
support and investment. Cloud systems cost less,
iterate faster and scale automatically.
These differences factored into Amgen's decision
to start migrating its SAP applications away from
on-premise infrastructure.
"SAP was running on a physical hardware, which was
very complex, very hard to manage, very expensive,"
Harish Mundre, Principal Cloud Solution Architect
at Amgen, said at AWS re:Invent 2017. "We're not
moving to the cloud to save the cost. If you save any
cost, that's a bonus for us. Mainly we are looking for
expedient agility. On-demand self service ... is the
biggest benefit for our global ERP team."
As Amgen's focus on agility suggests, the value of
the cloud is magnified by the pace at which the
biopharma industry and the rules that govern it are
changing. New, major regulations are coming down
the pipe at a daunting rate, forcing companies to
adapt to legislation such as the U.S. Drug Quality
and Security Act and Europe's Falsified Medicines
Directive simultaneously.
SAP helps its customers adapt to these rules and
other requirements by releasing new modules. Yet, as
these modules require updated ERP software to run,
uptake is limited by the speed at which companies
move to the latest ERP Central Component (ECC).
This can require new infrastructure for on-premise
installations.
The cloud eliminates this constraint on the uptake
of new modules by enabling the rapid, ongoing
iteration of the ECC version. This makes it trivial
for companies to keep their ECC up to date and, by
extension, to quickly adopt modules SAP releases
to facilitate compliance with new regulations.
HOW THE CLOUD IMPROVES
COMPLIANCE, RELIABILITY, AND SECURITY
Agility is one of the main motivations for moving
to the cloud. Compliance is another.
By treating infrastructure as code, companies can
control infrastructure like software. Testing and
validating each change to the environment becomes
a simple task. Once companies are up and running in
the cloud, automated traceability and audit processes
enable continuous compliance.
Reliability and resilience are als o big factors,
particularly when working with mission-critical
applications such as those provided by SAP.
The uptime of these applications is vital to the smooth
