AWS Case Study: Informa SAP Migration

In 2011, Informa’s Global Technical Operations team, based in the company’s United Kingdom IT Department, undertook the process of upgrading its Systems Applications and Products in Data Processing (SAP) environment. One aspect of this upgrade involved archiving the company’s historic information for storage within Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Neil Tubb, head of the Global Technical Operations team, says, “We selected AWS for a number of reasons. First, we wanted a challenging project to cut our teeth on so we could learn AWS. We also needed a highly resilient platform that was low cost to host the archived data. AWS fit this brief.”

In order to migrate the historic data, Tubb’s team installed the website management software Open Text 10.1 within AWS. The team incorporated its AWS hosting services into its local and wide area networks (LAN/WAN) using Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) connectivity. With Amazon VPC, Informa’s AWS hosting service presents itself to SAP as a traditional server. The SAP environment then runs its archiving jobs and transfers the resulting data to AWS, as it would any other physical server integrated within the Informa architecture.

As a result of this collaboration of platforms, Informa reports to be the first company to archive SAP data to a cloud services provider, and also the first Open Text customer to utilize cloud technology. Despite the fact that Informa had not previously performed this type of data archiving, the company credits AWS and its support services with helping the Global Technical Operations team reach its goal quickly and effectively.

Neil Tubb explains, “The ability to spin up a server instantly certainly helped during the proof of concept phase, and the proactive emails we received during the early days of Amazon VPC connection helped us configure the VPC correctly.”

As a result of this and other positive experiences, Informa’s IT departments across the globe use AWS for their own projects. In response, Informa offices in the United States, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific region are all making use of various AWS features.

Back at the UK IT Department, Neil Tubb notes, “Our requirement isn’t about web hosting; it’s about resilience and learning what AWS can do for us, now and in the future. The cloud is the future and being an earlier adopter has given us the skills and ability to understand how we can integrate this technology into our suite of offerings.”

To learn more, visit http://www.informa.com/ .

Added November 10, 2011