2020

Let Sify, your Cloud expert manage your SAP Migration

Cloud adoption for SAP S/4HANA

Powered with Cloud and Analytics, SAP S/4HANA is undoubtedly a comprehensive, intelligent business suite delivering to organizations, unique insights, and intelligence. However, moving to SAP S/4HANA is not as simple as it may seem initially. It is dependent on your insight and capability to fundamentally examine your business processes, infrastructure, and data. Furthermore, you need to reconsider your business objectives and project priorities to achieve seamless migration to Cloud and realize all its benefits.

To evaluate how SAP S/4HANA can benefit your organization, it is always sensible to assess the consumption and configuration of your existing SAP environment. Subsequently, you need to create a migration to Cloud roadmap for seamless technical deployment, depending on project specific requirements, strategic transformation goals, etc.

Irrespective of the approach you choose, be it New Implementation or System Conversion, there are various advisory tools, such as Business Scenario Recommendations, Readiness Check Tool, etc. that can help you gain the necessary insight and confidence to simplify your move to SAP S/4HANA. After gaining clarity, you should continue forward with your S/4HANA adoption on Cloud in a phase-driven manner.

Five phases of successful SAP S/4HANA Cloud journey

Why Sify for SAP migration, infrastructure, and management?

It is important not to get overwhelmed by the adoption complexity, as finding the right partner will alleviate most of your concerns. Sify has a rich experience and all the state-of-the-art tools required for successfully migrating heterogeneous or homogeneous SAP workloads and managing them.

Sify provides you the option of choosing the most appropriate environment for your SAP workloads. You can host your SAP workloads on HANA grid (which is certified by SAP) on Sify’s proprietary Cloud – CloudInfinit. You also have the choice of deploying it on a Hyperscaler (AWS, Azure, etc.) with DR on Sify’s SAP grid or vice versa to leverage the benefits of Hybrid Cloud. Furthermore, we hold a distinct level of specialization in ECC to S/4HANA conversions, implementation and carve out scenarios. Sify’s integrated play across Network, Cloud and SAP ensures that you get flexibility, agility, and choice for comprehensive coverage of all your SAP needs.

Snapshot of Sify’s SAP offerings

Count on Sify to accomplish your migration goals

Enterprises worldwide are in a quest to leverage the true potential of the Cloud. As Cloud allows organizations to unify disparate business functions, streamline processes, enhance organizational efficiency, achieve resilience, and control cost, decision-makers across the business world are looking for the most suitable Cloud and a competent Cloud partner.

Herein, Oracle Cloud has certainly been able to garner attention by helping organizations optimize IT infrastructure, achieve operational excellence, and reduce cost significantly. Oracle ensures a very unique value proposition as it uses the same on-premises products and tools for Cloud. It is built from on-prem deployments, unlike other Cloud providers which started with a Cloud-native approach only. As organizations transition their processes, business functions, or implement a complete transformation to the Cloud, the “integration” between different Cloud and on-premise enterprise applications will be the focus. We know that not all enterprise applications will migrate to the Cloud at the same time, therefore it is imperative that existing on-premise integration is utilized to communicate between the on-premise applications and the Cloud applications via a common cloud integration platform. In such a situation, Oracle certainly ensures distinct advantages.

Oracle is the only cloud provider to offer guaranteed availability, management, and performance SLAs. Moreover, it also ensures greater control and visibility of Cloud resources, which further helps in improving top-line business performance. That’s why organizations are keen to migrate to Oracle Cloud.

However, organizations face distinct challenges and complications while executing the migration plan. As we work with organizations (across verticals) for their Cloud transition or migration projects, we have gained expertise in helping them identify all pitfalls and follow a trusted approach to create and implement successful migration to Oracle Cloud.

This blog highlights the major challenges faced by organizations during their migration journey to Oracle Cloud and the best practices to tackle those challenges. Furthermore, we shall discuss how Oracle Cloud, Sify’s hybrid IT-ready data centers (with Cloud Adjacent and Near Cloud data centers), and Network Services can help you accomplish your Cloud transformation goals competently.

CHALLENGE: Not every workload is Cloud-ready for Lift-N-Shift

BEST PRACTICE: De-couple the workloads into different categories

It’s a well-known fact that not all workloads can be migrated to Cloud using the same migration strategies. Therefore, Sify has come up with a comprehensive range of Cloud Assessment Services which help you decouple the workloads into two broad categories – the workload that must be migrated to Oracle Cloud and the workloads that can be hosted in Sify’s Hybrid IT-ready DC. This will help you draft the most appropriate and cost-effective Cloud adoption/migration plan.

CHALLENGE: Inter-dependency between applications

BEST PRACTICE: Build migration specific business case for each application

Sify’s Cloud Assessment and Migration Services help you identify inter-dependency between applications and build migration specific business case considering each application. Our Hybrid IT-ready data centers allow you to establish fast and secure interconnection among all your applications hosted in Oracle Cloud, without any network latency issue.

CHALLENGE: How to deal with legacy applications

BEST PRACTICE: Leverage Cloud Integration Platforms for hybrid deployments

As all enterprise applications cannot be migrated to Cloud due to architectures, dependencies, and cost, there needs to be effective integration between legacy and cloud applications. Sify is uniquely positioned not just with the ability to meet Network SLAs but also with the ability to design, implement and manage hybrid deployments with legacy on-premise applications and the Cloud applications, via a common Cloud integration platform leveraging Oracle technologies.

Count on Sify for a successful migration to Oracle Cloud

Sify complements Oracle’s public Cloud portfolio with its expansive service portfolio encompassing data center services, migration and assessment services, telecom, and managed services. This offers customers a holistic value proposition for their Cloud journey which no other service provider can offer.

With the Oracle Cloud data center co-located with us, Sify is in a unique position to offer customers the advantages of Oracle public Cloud and co-location of partial workloads from the same premises which are interconnected through a high speed, low latency, and highly secure ‘FastConnect’ link. This allows customers to go for their own hybrid data centers without having to worry about latency issues.

With our cloud@core strategy, Hybrid IT-ready Data Centers and Network Services offering <1ms latency for Hybrid deployments, we are the only Cloud Transformation partner that can help you leverage the true potential of hybrid Cloud. Our Hyperscale Cloud and Data Center Services, low latency, high bandwidth, and secure connections to Oracle Cloud ensure better performance at predictable costs. Moreover, our team of competent Cloud experts and Oracle-certified solution architects are willing to offer prescriptive guidance at every stage of your Cloud adoption and transformation, to help you achieve your Oracle migration goals.

Rationalize, Scale, and Manage your network effortlessly.

In today’s technologically advanced era, enterprises across realms have complex ICT environments – virtual and geographically spread. The advent of Cloud and rise of multiple solution providers globally have encouraged organizations to pick and choose the perfect mix to host their applications, servers, and data across a diverse landscape of Data Centers and multiple clouds. This has benefitted organizations worldwide, in terms of ease of operations, higher level of flexibility and better speed to market. However, at the same time, one must acknowledge that management of such a highly complex ICT environment has become a major challenge for many organizations in the digital era.

Organizations must understand that all the components of their diverse IT and network infrastructure – consisting of applications, servers, machines, network peripheral equipment, sensors, or even distinct Cloud environments – are not discrete or isolated units anymore, but a part of a larger organization context, making them extremely valuable for business progression and business continuity. All these components must be unified and viewed in a consolidated way for better performance and security. That’s where, Network Consolidation becomes imperative!

Organizations that have complex ICT environments face distinct challenges that hamper their overall performance and efficiency. Some of the most common challenges in this changing and ever evolving Network and IT environment are:

• Multiple service providers management: Modern enterprises leverage a perfect blend of best-of-breed network solutions from distinct service providers as this ensures advantages of redundancy, resiliency, choice of network media, and connectivity to remote locations. However, managing all the distinct service providers is quite a challenging task and has some inherent problems, such as lack of ownership and visibility, inconsistency in services, inability to leverage analytics, and governance related risks.
• Limited in-house network management capabilities: This is another major concern for organizations across industry verticals. If they opt for establishing an in-house network management setup, then it becomes a very cost-intensive decision to hire the skilled workforce, procure the technology, develop the competence, and achieve a high level of scalability. Furthermore, an in-house setup would need hefty and timely investments to keep pace with evolving technology landscape.
• The demand for constantly re-architecting network: Every enterprise network nowadays has a host of different applications, which has given rise to changed traffic patterns. These mission-critical applications demand uninterrupted collaboration and traffic exchange, which calls for a continuous re-architecting of network to connect data, applications, people, and varied components of the IT infrastructure.
• Shift of focus from Network uptime to Application performance: Traditionally, network has always been uptime-focused, however in current situation where applications are hosted in multiple of Data Centers, Public & Pvt Clouds, businesses are more concerned about how applications perform over the network as this directly impacts the end user experience. The changing demands of high-performance computing and fast cloud migrations have led to a change in paradigm for networks with their SLAs being evaluated on Application intent rather than Network intent. Therefore, new-age networks must capably meet the rising needs of all mission-critical applications that are running concurrently.
• Unification of underlay and overlay networks: To meet changing demands of businesses, networks have grown and evolved organically over different periods of time. This has resulted in complex architectures of underlay & overlay networks. With changing priorities of organizations and rise of application-focused networks, it is important to unify the underlay and overlay networks for optimal utilization, enhanced efficiency, improved user experience, and robust security.
• Connectivity across DC and Cloud landscape: With increased Cloud adoption, it is very important to maintain a perfect sync between data centers and Cloud. Therefore, they need an excellent Network Interconnection that can guarantee seamless connectivity across all the data centers, Cloud environments, international cable landing stations, third party telco infrastructure, etc. for deterministic connectivity and extensive reach.
• Integration of IT, OT, and People: Majority of organizations nowadays have geographically distributed offices, where employees and end users use multiple devices in different regions. It is important to allow them secure and fast access to applications in Cloud and data centers for better experience, collaboration, and organizational efficiency. At the same time, the same Network must ensure seamless connectivity of IT Infrastructure as well as OT assets like WiFi access points, IoT devices and sensors. Herein, network plays an important role in integration of all aspects of IT, OT, and people.

As discussed above, organizations with complex ICT environments face distinct challenges. This not only hampers efficiency and performance but also impacts end user experience, hence compelling organizations to revisit their network strategies. Enterprises want actionable information to be available to end users wherever they are. The rise in mobility and multitude of devices has paved way for direct access to corporate information, which highlights the need of secure and consolidated network which can be scaled rapidly on-demand. The CIOs need to have complete visibility of all network assets and take decisions on network performance and network behavior dynamically. This can be achieved only through network consolidation.

Consolidating your network under one trusted service provider will ensure you a centralized real-time visibility and control over your entire network. Network consolidation improves network performance management and makes network provisioning easier with lesser handoff points between providers, devices, and IT assets, at a reduced cost!

Network consolidation becomes a very complex task and it has a lot of parameters and moving parts to be looked into. Therefore, it is imperative to seek an expert guidance in this quest.

Sify can help you accomplish your Network Consolidation goals. Some of the key differentiators that make us the preferred network consolidation partner are:

• Hybrid Network Strategy – Use of Internet for Business Applications: The shift from data centers towards Cloud has resulted in more prevalent use of the Internet as a connectivity option, in addition to MPLS. Today, an SLA-defined Internet strategy is a more reliable and pervasive way to establish a robust connectivity throughout the widely spread ICT environment. Hence, modern day businesses need hybrid WAN strategy – use of internet for business applications along with MPLS. Sify is empowered with India’s largest MPLS Network covering 1,600 towns and cities across India with 3,100 Points of Presence. We provide consistent, secure, high-speed Internet connectivity in more than 130 countries together with 800+ local and global partners. With our robust MPLS and Internet services, we can help you consolidate your network for both primary and secondary connectivity needs.
• Cloud Ready Networks – Advantage Hyper-scale: As majority of modern enterprises opt for hybrid or multi-cloud model, enterprises need ubiquitous connectivity to data centers and public Clouds. Sify’s robust interconnection network helps enterprises connect and integrate with Hyper-scalers seamlessly to simplify Cloud connectivity and reduce provisioning time. Our interconnection network improves cross-cloud application interaction, performance, and scalability, which ultimately paves way for enhanced quality of experience. Sify enjoys a great stature in the India Cloud market as we are the preferred partner of all major Hyper-scalers such as AWS, Azure, Oracle, and GCP including their respective Cloud connect services. With our Cloud connect, DC Interconnects and carrier neutral network with multiple internet exchanges, we deliver a well-architected and cost-effective Cloud-ready network for a secure, low latency and deterministic connectivity.
• Strategic Move from Wireless to Wireline Connectivity Media – More relevant than ever: Today, convergence of wireless and wireline is happening at a lightening pace. Till now, fiber penetration was restricted to backbone networks in the network value chain; however, as we move to the hyper-connected era, networks fiberization becomes important for the increasing cloud adoption. Therefore, Sify has invested in dense fiberization in backhaul and last mile connectivity. Sify’s state of the art 100G ethernet infrastructure – Metro-XConnect integrates multiple Clouds, our Cloud-adjacent data centers, third party data centers, and transit points in the Network. Our investments into Metro-XConnect can help customers consolidate their networks and leverage multiple benefits of Cloud, such as low latency, high reliability, improved scalability, and uninterrupted operations.
• Strong Managed Services and Network Operations Outsourcing capabilities: Empowered with strong Managed Services and Network Operations Outsourcing capabilities, Sify can help you integrate, consolidate, and transform your networks across varied ICT environments for visibility, control, and easy orchestration. Our integrated skillsets, processes, toolsets as well as the state-of-the-art Network Operations Center (NOC) and Security Operations Centre (SOC) can enable you to monitor and manage network and security devices comprehensively. Our NOC services are SLA-driven and outcome-based, which ensures predictable performance. Sify also helps in assessing & consolidating WAN networks; redesigning & reengineering as-is WAN network; and managing Network and Network assets 24X7. Additionally, you can outsource your Network operations and management, including management of all service providers and vendors.
• Integrated capabilities across Core, Management Layer, and Edge : In the digital age, enterprises need to focus on faster compute and Edge connectivity. To accomplish this goal, it is important to transform and rearchitect your network – at the core, the management & visibility layer, and the Edge. With our DC and Cloud Interconnects, combined with expertise to deploy technologies like SDWAN and NFV, we hold expertise in network transformation at the core. At the Network Management layer, Sify can manage your WAN, provide 24×7 monitoring of links, undertake network management under a unified SLA across multiple service providers. At the Edge, Sify ensures end to end implementation and access configuration of Wi-Fi, IoT devices and integration with the Enterprise Network.

AWS cost optimization is an ongoing process. AWS cloud resource utilization needs to be continually monitored to determine when the resources are being under-utilized or not being utilized or idling to reduce the costs by deleting/terminating/freeing the unused resources.

It’s also helpful to consider the Saving Plan or Reserved Instances to ensure full utilization as per the anticipated constant level of consumption.

While the fundamental process of cost optimization on AWS remains the same – monitor AWS costs and usage, there are a number of tactical ways to analyze the operational data to find the opportunities for savings and take actions to realize the savings.

Pillars of Cloud Cost Optimization

1. Right-Sizing

Identify the resources with low-utilization and reduce the cost by stopping or rightsizing.

• Use AWS Cost Explorer Resource Optimization report to get the list of idle or low utilized resources. Reduce the costs by either stopping or downsizing the instances.
• Use AWS Compute Optimizer for downsizing recommendations within or across instance families, upsizing recommendations to remove performance bottlenecks and recommendations for EC2 instances that are parts of an Auto Scaling group.
• Identify Amazon RDS, Amazon Redshift instances with low utilization and reduce the cost by stopping (RDS) and pausing Redshift outside of business hours or non-processing timeframe.
• Use Amazon EC2 Spot Instances to reduce EC2 costs where possible – SPOT instance mgmt. can be effectively managed by 3rd part tool, such as Spotinst, for automatic termination and new instance availability without impacting end users.
• Review and modify EC2 Auto-Scaling Groups configuration to ensure scaling is happening on the right thresholds instead of setting it at the lower thresholds.
• Try using Elastic Kubernetes Services (EKS) and Elastic Compute services (ECS – EC2 Model) worker nodes under auto-scaling using SPOT instances (instead of on-demand/RI) for reducing the cost.
• Consider using Elastic Compute services (ECS -Fargate) to start the tasks with lower configuration (e.g. 0.5 vCPUs & 1GB RAM) per task and use auto-scaling instead of higher configuration per task.
• Multi-AZs configuration for DEV, test, UAT, or DR environment may not be necessary or useful for RDS, Redis, NAT, or other PAAS services (unless business really requires achieving any objective); therefore, it’s important to design wisely.

2. Instance Family Refresh

Each instance/series/family offers different varieties of computing, memory, and storage parameters. Instance types within their set groupings are often retired as a unit when the hardware required to keep them running is replaced by newer technology.

• Upgrade instances to the latest generation offering lower costs.
• For PAAS services, such as RDS, Redis, ElasticSearch, MSK, use instance type wisely, particularly for pre-PROD or DR and appropriate AZs to scale the instances. It may not require more than 2 AZs even while considering business SLAs. Keep an eye on the latest family of infrastructure and refresh to take the benefits of lower costing.
• Use low costing instance type for Development, QA, or the environment (e.g. T3a) wherein performance benchmarking certainly is not required for the business SLA.
• Always start with low and upgrade the right size to a suitable family considering the business use cases and traffic patterns.

3. Compute Savings Plans to reduce EC2, Fargate and Lambda costs

Compute Savings (Compute Savings Plans and EC2 Instance Savings Plans) Plans automatically apply to EC2 instance usage regardless of instance family, size, AZ, region, OS or tenancy, and apply to Fargate and Lambda usage. Use one year, no upfront Compute Savings Plans to get a discount of up to 54% compared to On-Demand pricing. Once you sign up for Savings Plans, your computer usage is automatically charged at the discounted Savings Plans prices. Any usage beyond your commitment will be charged at regular On-Demand rates. Please follow Point Nos. 1 and 2 before adopting Saving PLAN. Saving Plan has a lot of advantages over AWS Reserved Instances with one condition – “Usage commitment/Hour”

Reference link – https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws-cost-management/getting-started-with-aws-savings-plans/

4. Reserved Instances (RIs)

Even though the Saving plan supersedes the RI option, some of the PAAS services are outside of the Saving Plan program as of today in April 2020.

• Purchase reserved nodes for RDS, Redshift, Elasticsearch and ElastiCache Services to reduce the cost.
• Many instance type discounts are larger and at the top end may be over 60% in the case of some 3 year all upfront terms. Identify the instances & take call saving plan vs RI intelligently.
• You can get shorter term RIs on the marketplace.

5. Scheduling on/off times

It’s worth scheduling on/off for non-production instances used for development, staging, testing, and QA as it can save up to 65% of running these instances if you apply an “on” schedule of 8.00 a.m. to 8.00 p.m. from Monday to Friday. However, it’s possible to save a lot more — especially if development teams work in irregular patterns or irregular hours. Plan more aggressive schedules by analyzing utilization metrics to determine when the instances are most frequently used or apply an always-stopped schedule which can be interrupted when access to the instances is required.

6. Orphaned resources

Identifying waste takes time and accurate reporting. It is a great reason to invest time and energy in developing a proper tagging strategy to make this an easy process.

• For unutilized AWS EC2s, use Cost Explorer Compute Optimizer report or extract CW stats and take actions.
• Terminate VMs that were spun up for training or testing.
• Delete unattached EBS volumes – Check Volumes page and available EBS volumes status.
• Delete obsolete snapshots and lifecycle as required to meet the business demand.
• For idle load balancers, try to use ALB with path/content-based routing.
• Release unattached Elastic IP addresses.

7. Storage

• EBS volumes that have very low activity (less than 1 IOPS per day) over a period of 15 days indicate that they are probably not in use. Identify these volumes using the Trusted Advisor Underutilized Amazon EBS Volumes Check. To reduce costs, first, snapshot the volume (in case you need it later), and then delete these volumes.
• Use S3 Analytics to analyze storage access patterns on the object data set for 30 days or longer. It makes recommendations on where you can leverage S3 Infrequently Accessed (S3 IA) to reduce costs. You can automate the process of moving these objects into lower-cost storage tier using Life Cycle Policies. Alternately, you can also use S3 Intelligent-Tiering, which automatically analyzes and moves your objects to the appropriate storage tier.
• Move infrequently accessed data to lower-cost tiers.
• Use S3 One Zone if business SLA allows you to do so.

8. Containerization

Containers can help to get the most out of available computer hardware and software resources which are Lightweight, have start-up time in milliseconds, and require less memory space. Containers help to achieve the scale of the economy by reducing the IT management resources, snapshot size, spinning up applications, reduced & simplified security updates, etc. Containers are a better choice when your biggest priority is maximizing the number of applications running on a minimal number of servers.

9. Local Caching

If data transfer from EC2 to the public internet shows up as a significant cost, consider using Amazon CloudFront. Any image, video, or static web content can be cached at AWS edge locations worldwide, using the Amazon CloudFront Content Delivery Network (CDN). CloudFront eliminates the need to over-provision capacity in order to serve potential spikes in traffic. Use CloudFront when your userbase is geographically distributed.

10. VPC endpoints

Heavy data lifting to S3 from private subnets (e.g. static contents, backup, videos, etc.) require NAT gateway. Use VPC endpoint to reduce the NAT gateway data out the cost and move data securely over the AWS backbone. This will reduce the NAT Gateway data out the cost that occurs to S3.

11. Regional and AZs Cost

AWS AZ and regional cost can be eliminated wisely through right solutioning.

With-in availability zone (AZ)

• Data transfer costs for transferring data in the same region and within the same availability zone are zero, however with one requirement that you must be using a private IP address.
• If you are using a public or Elastic IPv4 address or IPv6 address, data transfer out from EC2 will be charged at 0.01/GB. In the same way, data transfer into AWS EC2 will be charged at 0.01/GB if you are using a public or Elastic IPv4 address or IPv6 address.

Across availability zones in the same region

• Data transfer between AWS services located in the same region but in different availability zones is considered as regional data transfer and is charged at $ 0.01/GB (outgoing data transfer).
• In the same way, data transfer into EC2 from an AWS service in another availability zone is charged at $ 0.01/GB.

This is only true for some AWS services like Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, Amazon Redshift or Amazon ElastiCache instances, etc.

• Architect your systems so that there is minimal data transfer across AWS regions or availability zones.
• Architect your AWS environment such that data transfer is restricted to within an availability zone or within a region at the most.
• Try to use private IP addresses instead of public or elastic IP addresses wherever possible.

Conclusion

Fine-tuning your cloud infrastructure is critical to make sure that your overall bill stays in the limit. Proven cloud cost optimization strategies outlined in this blog will help you cut down your cloud costs by eliminating unused resources and/or choosing the right resource plan. Sify has been meticulously managing the cost optimization projects of large enterprise customers for many years to reduce their AWS bills substantially. Sify, with its highly dedicated, well experienced and AWS certified SMEs, can help you realize your business objectives by fine-tuning your environment.

If you are concerned about your ever-increasing AWS cost, the above-given strategies will help you optimize the cost. You can also choose Sify – the experienced AWS Managed Service provider – for yielding the best results.