How Nippon Migrated their SAP Infra to Cloud

About Nippon Life India Asset Management Limited:

Nippon Life India Asset Management Ltd, also known as Nippon India Mutual Fund (NIMF) was established as a trust under the Indian Trusts Act, of 1882. Nippon Life Insurance Company (NLI) is the Sponsor and Nippon Life India Trustee Ltd (NLITL) is the Trustee.

Nippon India Mutual Fund has been registered with the Securities & Exchange Board of India (SEBI) vide registration number MF/022/95/1 dated June 30, 1995. Nippon India Mutual Fund (NIMF) was earlier known as Reliance Mutual Fund. The name of Mutual Fund was changed from Reliance Mutual Fund to Nippon India Mutual Fund effective September 28, 2019. NIMF was formed to launch various schemes under which units are issued to the public to contribute to the capital market and provide investors with opportunities to invest in diversified securities.

The main objectives of NIMF are:

• To carry on the activity of a mutual fund as may be permitted at law, formulate and devise various collective schemes of savings and investments for people in India and abroad, and also ensure liquidity of investments for the unit holders.
• To deploy funds thus raised to help the unit holders earn reasonable returns on their savings.
• Taking such steps might be necessary periodically to realize the effects without any limitations.

Challenges:

• Nippon’s Business Application including a business-critical SAP environment—was running on IBM Cloud. Nippon sought to migrate SAP servers to a public cloud environment.
• The main challenge was to optimize the overall cost without compromising the performance of the SAP applications. In IBM cloud cost of hosting and maintenance/support was high.

To get the challenges addressed, Nippon had search of right migration partner to ensure no PRE and POST technical challenges.

Why Amazon Web Services?

NIPPON engaged SAPPHIRE to migrate its SAP environment to the AWS Cloud. The core AWS services supporting the NIPPON SAP environment include Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, which provide the computing power to run the environment’s applications.

For storing all SAP data, Nippon uses Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) for storage. The feature of EC2 auto recovery helps with low-cost hardware and high availability of the EC2 instances. AMI snapshots of EC2 instances will help with low-cost disaster recovery to another availability zone. Sapphire recommended the customer to go for the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and provided help during the deployment of HANA with a smooth backup and restoration process and high data protection. Implemented High security with optimum performance level for end users.

To overcome above mentioned challenge Sapphire and the AWS Team suggested the following architecture diagram:

Benefits:

NIPPON today no longer experiencing the high-cost issue of running the SAP applications on Public Cloud. The company has also enhanced the speed of its business applications, including SAP. Sapphire helped with cost optimization based on experience running SAP applications on the Cloud.

With the SAP environment running on AWS, their application is more secure for end-level users with high Performance.

Provisioning times for SAP instances have also dropped from weeks to days since the migration to AWS.