SUDO Consultants helps CCBCSA migrate data center workloads to AWS

Managing CCBCSA’s on-premises data center meant balancing constant infrastructure demands against the risk of business disruption. A single hardware failure could mean hours of downtime, and in an all-day beverage operation, that disruption could translate into millions in lost revenue. With a team of only eight IT employees responsible for technology across the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, CCBCSA had little margin for unplanned outages. Hardware refresh cycles, network failures, and physical-infrastructure demands kept the team reactive rather than focused on new projects.

CCBCSA also faced a licensing challenge that complicated its migration plans. As part of the global Coca-Cola system, the company already had a Microsoft Enterprise Agreement that covered Windows Server and Microsoft SQL Server database licenses. Migrating those workloads to shared cloud infrastructure could have required CCBCSA to repurchase licenses that it had already paid for, weakening the business case for migration. At the same time, the refresh deadline of the company’s data center was approaching, and its leadership had set a clear goal of migrating fully to the cloud. The question was no longer whether to modernize but how to migrate while preserving existing license investments and minimizing business disruption.

CCBCSA chose AWS after SUDO Consultants completed a 2-to-3-day infrastructure assessment. Other providers had advised the company to repurchase licenses on shared cloud infrastructure, but SUDO Consultants identified an alternative path. With more than 150 AWS Certifications, SUDO Consultants was the right partner whose experience matched the migration complexity. The partner recommended a dedicated-host architecture that addressed the licensing issue directly and gave CCBCSA greater control over workload placement.

The team deployed Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Dedicated Hosts, which provide dedicated hardware to support existing software licenses. This helped CCBCSA use its existing licenses through the bring-your-own-license model. Dedicated Hosts also suited the company’s manufacturing environment, where the team wanted predictable placement and control for plant-related systems. CCBCSA’s workloads include SAP Enterprise Resource Planning Central Component, human resources systems, sales applications, customer relationship management systems, Active Directory, and web workloads. Running those on Dedicated Hosts provides the team with fixed, predictable billing and control similar to what it had in its on-premises data center. For managed file storage, SUDO Consultants introduced Amazon FSx for Windows File Server to provide highly available, high performance storage to Windows applications, replacing a file server that had required active operating-system management.

SUDO Consultants brought more than technical recommendations to the engagement. Because CCBCSA was migrating to AWS for the first time, the partner built security visibility into the landing zone while working directly with CCBCSA’s application vendors and security staff to manage knowledge transfer. The team deployed Amazon GuardDuty to protect AWS accounts, workloads, and data with intelligent threat detection. As part of the landing zone, the team also implemented AWS Security Hub to help prioritize critical security issues and AWS Config to assess, audit, and evaluate resource configurations. With these services in place, CCBCSA could continually detect threats, view its security posture, and monitor its configuration across the new environment. SUDO Consultants organized the migration into waves and aligned them to individual application teams and business usage patterns. “That was important because it’s a virtually always-on operation, and it’s difficult to get a small window for migrations,” says Syed Kareemuddin, IT operations and cybersecurity manager at CCBCSA. “If it’s not completed within that window, we need to wait another week or month.”

CCBCSA now runs 40 percent of its workloads on AWS and is working to resolve dependencies for the remaining on-premises systems. Uptime has improved from 99.9 to 99.999 percent, excluding force majeure events. For a business where every hour of downtime carries direct revenue risk, that improvement gives the IT team greater confidence in daily operations. Deployment speed has improved by 30 percent, and the IT team reports operating 20 percent more efficiently overall. “Where hardware procurement previously added weeks or months to new projects, we can now provision resources within 1 day,” says Kareemuddin.

The migration has also changed how the IT team supports the business. CCBCSA can respond more quickly to new project requests, support public service applications with greater availability, and spend less time managing physical infrastructure. “I’d recommend not wasting time managing hardware and local on-premises data centers,” says Kareemuddin. “By working alongside AWS and reliable partners such as SUDO Consultants, IT teams can focus more on innovation and building technology for the business.”

AWS Premier Tier Services Partner SUDO Consultants delivers cloud, AI, modernization, DevOps, and managed services.