SAP Business One Migration to Azure for an Online Retailer

About Client

The client is an American stationery and lifestyle brand with an online store.

Business Requirement

The client’s growing e-tail business demanded uncompromised performance from their ERP and other business applications. They wanted to migrate their SAP Business One (B1) ERP running on-premises to a scalable public cloud based on Microsoft Azure. Additionally, to have a business continuity plan in place, they wanted to have their backup and DR solution set in Azure. SAP Engineers at CCS had to provide solutions for the client’s below requirements and circumstances:–

Migrate client’s SAP B1 ERP to Azure and upgrade their SAP B1 release version from 9.1 to 9.2.

Client had an outdated virtualization software and faced compatibility issues with the latest OS.

Given their outdated hardware, a refresh would imply heavy costs for the client.

Windows and virtualization environment license costs would add to their expenses.

As the client had no secure backup in place, their offsite backup copy would require manual intervention.

In case of any major disaster or hardware outage, recovery of the whole system would span days or even an entire business week.

CCS Solution

CCS SAP Engineers designed a cost-effective and performance-oriented solution for migrating the client’s ERP to the cloud.

Ensured that the Azure cloud infra was optimally sized based on their resource utilization.

Cloud environment was configured in compliance with SAP specifications to deliver an enhanced ERP experience.

Seamlessly upgraded to SAP B1 release version 9.2 with minimal business disruption.

The environment was configured to deliver superior performance and maximum value to the client by automating the runtime of the infra.

Configured a long-term backup retention for Azure SQL database.

Replicated Azure VM to a secondary region as the client’s business continuity and disaster recovery strategy.

Secured the application access using VPN and virtual network.

Provided proactive monitoring of the cloud infra using Azure Monitor.

Business Benefits

Zero-error SAP application migration and version upgrade.

The migration aided the client increase their productivity and the availability of core SAP applications and lower operating costs.

Migrating to Azure meant zero investment in local hardware and its maintenance.

Automated about 90% of the client’s infrastructure. Scheduled start/stop, SAP Auto-scaling, virtual machine (VM) hardening and patch automation, and Azure monitoring were among the automation use cases implemented.

The client’s infrastructure, ERP, and database were made scalable to accommodate growing business needs.

Infrastructure build automation enables 40% faster deployment of new application features and upgrades.

Reduced network latency by 3x which helped users from the branch office access the ERP faster which was initially not the case.

10% improvement in the SAP application performance.