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A business environment as demanding and fast-paced as today’s demands efficiency, agility and faster go-to-market times from enterprises. Migrating SAP workloads to the cloud simplifies operations, reduces costs, and amplifies performance.

The ‘Enterprise Transformation Series’, hosted in association with AWS, features experts who have helped enterprises undergo a digital transformation by migrating their on-premise SAP workloads to the cloud.

In this episode, Vishal Krishna, Former Business Editor at YourStory spoke to Ashish Dhawan, Managing Director, Global Partner Sales for Enterprise and Microsoft Workloads at AWS. They discussed how businesses operating on a cloud platform are able to serve their customers better. They also spoke of other benefits that accompany such a switch such as reduced costs, and increased productivity with the latest AWS technology services.

Bringing agility with the cloud

Ashish first outlined how enterprises that have moved to a cloud platform have been able to serve their customers better, given their ability to leverage agile and elastic infrastructure. “Those who are on the fence (about migrating their SAP workloads to the cloud), are no longer so. Any application, including legacy applications. can move to the cloud,” he says.

He mentioned how every business’ aim was to be able to delight their customers, which is why they need to experiment fast, learn from their mistakes and know what makes their customers tick. He added that with cloud, enterprises can ramp up their storage, compute, networking and not worry about hardware restraints. They are able to implement new features and be more agile.

“Customers can see how fast your go-to-market times have become, and it has all been enabled through public cloud,” he says. He then cited the example of the Ashapura Group of Industries, which provides multi-mineral solutions to more than 70 countries. It moved its SAP workloads to AWS to achieve durability and scalability, all with a reduced migration time from 6 months to three to four weeks. Ashish mentioned how the migration improved support services, enabled business expansion and provided business performance by 40 percent.

Harnessing the power of advanced technologies on the cloud

Ashish highlighted how AWS has one of the most comprehensive data platforms, with more than 170 services to leverage advanced technologies such as AI/ML,data lakes, IoT among others that are being constantly updated. Taking the example of AI/ML, he said that AWS’ AI services mirror human cognition such as text-to-speech, speech-to-text, character recognition, comprehension of medical records and other records.

“We have an abstraction that enables businesses to train their models directly with Amazon Sagemaker,” he said, which enables speedy experimentation. He added that when customers migrate their SAP workloads, they can avail these services for the maximum benefits.

One of the most comprehensive cloud infrastructure

AWS is continuously innovating to provide more benefits to its users, says Ashish. Citing AWS Lambda as an example, he said, “We noticed there was a demand for trigger-based compute instances, and while no one asked for it, we launched the first serverless services… Today, AWS Lambda is one of our fastest growing services.”

He also talked about how customers are using relational database services like Amazon Aurora to get out of monolithic database contracts and innovate faster at one-tenth of their earlier costs. Ashish also explained about how security was a top priority for AWS, which is why it also has a host of security partners on the platform like Palo Alto Networks, F5 Networks and Splunk. They also have web applications and firewalls, along with 200+ compliances.

A structured approach to migration

Ashish highlighted the importance of having leadership aligned towards the cloud when it comes to enabling a successful migration to a cloud platform. “Following that, there should be strong goals developed on a top-down level. Only then will everyone put their might behind something like this to make sure it happens.Third, it is important to do a skill assessment, and any skill training required will be provided by AWS wherever needed,” he said. Lastly, he suggested that enterprises start with the applications that can be migrated easily as they build momentum for further migration.