VHV Group Migrates to SAP on AWS for Agility and Innovation with Netlution

Hanover-based VHV Group specializes in insurance and pension plans. For both policy holders and brokers, the VHV Group is a professional and future-driven partner with brands such as VHV Versicherungen, Hannoversche, and VAV Versicherungen (Vienna). It offers property, liability, and life insurance. The VHV Group bases its success on a skilled work force of 4,000 employees. The company is a big user of SAP, with several dozen separate systems in daily use, many of them critical for the business to function.

VHV Group needed to upgrade its systems to be ready for SAP S/4HANA, but when it began its project, hardware shortages created extra impetus for a cloud solution. “Either prices were very high or there was just zero availability—that encouraged us to look properly at a cloud migration,” says Frank Alsmann, head of cloud operations and external platforms at VHV Group. “Even if shortages went away, such a big hardware upgrade would require large capital expenditure and would be a very complex project to manage.”

Although hardware issues provided the final reason for VHV’s decision to migrate to Amazon Web Services (AWS), the company had worked with AWS on other projects—AWS is its preferred server-workload cloud provider. VHV also recognized the benefits of migrating SAP workloads to the cloud: greater agility, faster innovation, and potential cost savings.

VHV Group had some conversations directly with AWS before engaging AWS Partner Netlution. “We decided to work with Netlution because of its expertise and deep knowledge of SAP on AWS,” says Alsmann. “This also gave us access to AWS Migration Acceleration Program funding and significant investments.” VHV Group knew that working on its own would have taken up a lot of IT team time.

German insurance companies are highly regulated. They are covered by the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation but also by the Bundesanstalt für Finanzdienstleistungsaufsicht (BaFin), Germany’s financial regulatory authority. This was part of the reason for some cloud hesitancy across VHV Group, which also had concerns about the central importance of SAP to the business functions. “We are not a first mover—we are smart followers,” says Alsmann. “But we’ve really convinced people of the benefits of cloud. I would say it is the preferred solution for people now because of the success of this project, which is felt right across the business.”

The teams had to ensure that the existing systems remained available at all times without restrictions and that there was a secure and fully tested fallback position available if required. The project hit every deadline and is now running all test and temporary environments on AWS. It uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for reliable, scalable infrastructure on demand. Staff concerns about security, latency, and other issues have all been resolved. With training from both AWS and Netlution, Alsmann’s team took time to talk to users across the business and deal with their concerns. The result has been a broader acceptance of the cloud, thanks to the success of the SAP migration.

Migrating to SAP on AWS means that VHV Group has avoided a large capital expenditure in upgrading data centers and servers for S/4HANA. Instead it has moved to a more operational expenditure model. But these were not the most important factors in the migration. “It’s really about speed and innovation and freeing us from worrying about infrastructure and data centers,” says Alsmann. “We can spin up new environments quickly now, not wait for hardware to arrive, and get set up and secured.”

Highly automated systems allow developers to spin up new environments in hours now, not the weeks it took previously—assuming that the hardware needed was even available. The company has better visibility into system performance using native AWS monitoring tools, including AWS Systems Manager, a secure end-to-end management solution for resources on AWS and in multicloud and hybrid environments.

VHV Group is taking full control of the project after training and support from Netlution. It is using AWS Systems Manager to provide the right balance of instances to provide performance at the best price and to automate configuration and ongoing management of resources for SAP. AWS CloudFormation lets VHV Group speed up cloud provisioning with infrastructure as code (IAC) and automate resource management.

 

An iterative project approach helped demonstrate the strengths of migrating to SAP on AWS to the company’s wider business groups. The success of the project has helped develop a greater understanding of, and appreciation for, the benefits that the cloud can bring to VHV across the business.

Having successfully migrated VHV Group’s business warehouse, Netlution is now doing the same for its enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. With the speed and agility that the new setup provides, VHV can get new projects supported by SAP systems immediate

VHV’s IT teams now have more resources with less time devoted to managing infrastructure and on-premises systems. And decision makers now consider AWS to be a preferred option for future projects. “What began as a way to solve a hardware and upgrade issue has become so much more,” says Alsmann. “We’ve gained agility and flexibility and proven the effectiveness of SAP on AWS, and of AWS more widely, to the whole company.”