SAP Workloads on Amazon Web Services for Saudi Based Conglomerate

The customer is a closed joint stock company with a capital of 800 million Saudi Riyals. It is one of the most distinguished industrial companies in Saudi Arabia & the region and it also ranked among the top 100 companies in the Kingdom. With more than 46 years of experience and dedication, the customer remains aligned with national development plans and is committed to providing the needs of the local market and national industries, while also extending its strong existence in the regional and international markets.

Citrus Consulting Services Enables Saudi based Conglomerate in Enhancing its Industrial Developments and Growth by Deploying SAP Workloads on AWS.

The customer faced the following Challenges which encouraged them to choose AWS:

• The refresh of the on – premise infrastructure running the SAP environment was coming close and required the customer to invest a large capital in IT infrastructure.
• The customer needed to focus more on their core competencies which is managing various industries and its subsidiaries. Hence, it outsourced their IT Optimization and Modernization to Citrus wherein they wanted to save upfront capital to be invested in one shot and instead transition to an operational expenditure model.
• The customer had an On-premise infrastructure where they were running their SAP Application thereby requiring high maintenance and exorbitant costs to be spent on maintenance.
• The customer required their different resource metrics to be measured and monitored in order to upscale operational performance.
• The customer was further inclined to strengthen their existing IT Ecosystem in terms of security and stability of the ongoing operations.

The customer infrastructure is running on AWS Cloud, where various AWS services have been deployed with respect to the customer Requirement such as CloudTrail, CloudWatch, IAM in order to protect data, restrict Access, monitoring of security related activities and generate automated responses.

The customer used AWS CloudTrail in order to enable Governance, Auditing and compliance monitoring. CloudTrail helped the customer to record each API activity and made sure that every API is written to a log. Similarly, AWS CloudWatch was implemented for monitoring the resources which are being used and maintaining them accordingly. It helped them in collecting logs and metrics data. Also, AWS IAM enabled the customer to securely control access to the AWS resources which have been deployed, this service helped them to manage number of users and creating groups to manage different kind of users.

Each EC2 instance has an attached Elastic Block Store (EBS) volume, a high-performance block storage service designed for use with Amazon EC2 for both throughput and transaction intensive workloads at any scale. This duo of EC2 instances and EBS Volumes resides safely in the AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). The VPC then provisions a logically isolated section of the AWS Cloud where the resources were launched in a defined virtual network. The VPC was divided into a public subnet and three private subnets, where each private subnet was host to its own inter-related suite of applications.

The customer also used other services of AWS like CloudTrail which enables governance, compliance, operational auditing and risk auditing along with a service for monitoring and observability named Amazon CloudWatch. Finally, AWS Active Directory was setup for the customer industries for integrating it with the already existing active directory. Trend Micro Antivirus was implemented and configured with protecting the workloads on AWS as well as various applications and databases from malicious attacks. Palo Alto Firewall was also implemented which delivers visibility and control over applications, users, and content within the firewall using a highly optimised hardware and software architecture.

• Successful setup of the end to end SAP infrastructure on AWS
• Considerable drop in the upfront capital expenditure and transition further to the operational expenditure mode.
• Considerable reduction in the maintenance costs and overhead costs for the customer SAP Environment setup on AWS
• Successfully setup CloudWatch and CloudTrail Services for along with the appropriate metrics for monitoring the infrastructure. Also, setup various alarms for these metrics
• Complete backup of the entire system at the lowest cost possible for the customer.
• Strengthen the security and stability of the IT infrastructure Environment with AWS best practices and Industrial imperatives.

• A considerable change of focus on the operational expenditure model which lowered the TCO by nearly 20%.
• A completely successful implementation of CloudTrail and CloudWatch along with rest of the services on AWS for improved compliance and monitoring.
• Achieved a 100% successful test results for user-acceptance and stress test scenarios thereby showcasing a disruption free migration to AWS.
• Successful configuration of the antivirus and backup systems for a more stable environment and enhancing the security of the existing environment.