Migrating SAP infrastructure to AWS to increase availability, reduce costs with Siemens Digital Industries

Siemens Digital Industries helps industrial companies digitalize and automate their processes to unlock the potential of data and increase sustainability.

Siemens Digital Industries previously hosted its 11 SAP systems on premises. Some of its systems were over 20 years old and operated using antiquated hardware from multiple providers. Because the SAP systems are critical to manufacturing operations, Siemens Digital Industries wanted to increase availability and resiliency and benefit from the flexible and scalable cloud alternatives available from AWS. It also wanted to reduce costs using a pay-as-you-go model and consolidate its infrastructure to harmonize processes for backups, patching, and disaster recovery. The company went through an extensive proposal process because of the size and importance of the migration, choosing AWS due to its cost effectiveness and proven track record in other areas of the business.

Throughout the migration, Siemens Digital Industries worked closely with the AWS technical support team to define the target architecture and troubleshoot build. “Our communication with AWS support was always streamlined and fast,” says Fabian Fritz, IT lead for the migration project at Siemens Digital Industries. “We always got the answers we needed at the right time.” After a year of planning, Siemens Digital Industries incrementally migrated the systems to the cloud over 30 months, taking time to modernize the solution to reduce testing efforts and business downtime. “Because the AWS infrastructure is so stable, we could free up resources to tackle these additional projects,” says Fritz.

Using Amazon EC2, Siemens Digital Industries can handle the intensive computing power and up to 6 TB of RAM utilization needed to keep its SAP infrastructure running smoothly. With its previous on-premises environment, the company experienced more than 15 major incidents per year, which disrupted manufacturing processes and was costly when the factories needed to suspend work while the systems were down. “We have close to zero major incidents in the infrastructure layer on AWS,” says Fritz. “This has a significant competitive advantage because our business requires perpetual availability without disruptions to SAP.”

Siemens Digital Industries also decreased infrastructure incidents by increasing connectivity using AWS Transit Gateway, which helps organizations connect Amazon virtual private clouds, AWS accounts, and on-premises networks to a single gateway. Employees now always have access to the SAP systems across the globe. Using Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), object storage built to retrieve any amount of data from anywhere, the company can store database and file system backups and make the data accessible across different availability zones. “If the SAP systems and processes are up and running, we can unlock the full potential of our manufacturing processes,” says Fritz.

 

By running workloads in multiple AWS Availability Zones, Siemens Digital Industries reduced infrastructure costs while maintaining high availability. The company estimates that costs are 10–20 percent lower on AWS compared with its on-premises infrastructure, which amounts to significant cost savings, given the size of its SAP systems.

Siemens Digital Industries needs to maintain high security standards in the cloud, including following company-wide security protocols and processes while meeting data privacy expectations. It involved internal security experts from the beginning to make the most of AWS technology and validate that the migrated systems met or exceeded the security of its on-premises infrastructure. “We have maintained strong security while transforming our applications to AWS,” says Fritz. “The project proved that we can operate our mission-critical applications in a cloud environment.” Based on the success of the migration, other departments are considering migrating additional complex SAP systems to the cloud.

Because of the breadth and stability of AWS services, Siemens Digital Industries can focus on innovation rather than infrastructure. For example, the company can switch between backend systems and keep the entry point for users consistently at the same URL using Network Load Balancer, which load balances Transmission Control Protocol, User Datagram Protocol, and Transport Layer Security traffic with high performance. “We can configure this setup in a few minutes without managing the logic or hosting the server and software,” says Fritz. “We can spend more time working on the real business logic at the end of the day.”

Siemens Digital Industries successfully completed the migration to AWS while improving availability and reducing costs. Now, the company is focusing on optimization and using other AWS services for new use cases. For example, Siemens Digital Industries has started a proof of concept to use generative artificial intelligence to proactively monitor data from its SAP systems and further increase availability.

“With the migration to AWS, we stabilized our mission-critical SAP workloads and created a harmonized approach for the systems,” says Fritz. “We now have the opportunity to take the next step of using more cloud-native services, generative artificial intelligence, and so on.”