Atlas Paper Bag Moves SAP to AWS Over a Weekend with CONTAX
December 21, 2020 | by Timothy Carioscio
Atlas Paper Bag, a North American manufacturer of disposable paper products, moved its SAP environment to Amazon Web Services with CONTAX, its SAP partner. CONTAX ran the "lift and shift" migration over a weekend, and APB now has a more agile, scalable, reliable and secure SAP platform with no end-user retraining.
At a Glance
The Customer
Atlas Paper Bag Co. Ltd. (APB) was founded in 1969 and is one of North America's pre-eminent manufacturers in the disposable paper category. Part of its industry leadership comes from a forward-thinking IT strategy. APB has run its core business on SAP since 2012.
The Challenge
APB wanted the advantages of hosting its SAP environment on Amazon Web Services: more IT agility, scalability, reliability and security. It wanted to get there without retraining end users or tying up significant IT resources.
The Solution
APB asked CONTAX, its SAP partner, to make the move. As a partner of both SAP and AWS, CONTAX migrated the SAP environment to AWS as it was, a rehosting or "lift and shift" migration. Apart from regression testing on the development and quality assurance instances, the APB team did not need to be involved.
Same SAP, new home
The SAP software stayed as it was, so users carried on without any training.
Auto-recovery
The EC2 instance is configured for automatic recovery with Amazon CloudWatch, so the system recovers on its own in the rare event of a hardware failure.
Backups on Amazon S3
SAP backups are now stored on Amazon S3, designed for 99.999999999% durability, a significant step up from APB's previous backup strategy.
Private cloud network
The SAP instances run in an Amazon VPC, in data centers and on network architecture built for some of the most security-sensitive companies in the world.
The Results
- APB finished work on its old server on a Friday and started Monday on a cloud-hosted system
- New SAP instances can be provisioned in minutes instead of days or weeks, and a short-term sandbox can be created, used and decommissioned with no upfront cost, paying only for what is used
- Higher reliability, backed by the Amazon EC2 99.99% uptime commitment and automatic recovery
- Stronger security for the SAP instances under the AWS shared responsibility model
- No end-user training and no significant IT resource involvement
"Migrating our SAP workload to AWS was a breeze. We finished work on Friday on our old server and came in on Monday to a cloud-hosted system."
What's Next
APB is not yet running S/4HANA, but the migration is the first step in its S/4 journey. On AWS, APB can scale up compute capacity to power SAP HANA and anything else it needs in the future.
About SAP on AWS from CONTAX
CONTAX is an SAP and AWS partner that migrates SAP environments to Amazon Web Services and prepares customers for S/4HANA. Learn more about SAP on AWS and SAP S/4HANA.
About the Author
Timothy Carioscio
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