Partner Success with AWS / Financial Services / Germany
VHV Group Migrates to SAP on AWS for Agility and Innovation with Netlution
Achieved
complex migration without user impacts
Avoided
costly data center upgrade for S/4HANA
Improved
agility, flexibility, and productivity
Overview
VHV Group, a large German insurance provider with international operations, moved several dozen on-premises SAP systems to SAP on AWS with the help of AWS Partner Netlution, gaining increased agility and performance, and overcoming concerns about hardware shortages. The speedy migration also enabled VHV Group to upgrade to S/4HANA while making sure that it complied with strict German financial regulations. Developers can now spin up test environments in minutes or hours rather than the weeks it previously took to procure and deploy new hardware.
Moving Business Critical Systems with Zero Impact on Users
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.
We’ve gained agility and flexibility and proved the effectiveness of SAP on AWS, and of AWS more widely, to the whole company."
Frank Alsmann
Head of Cloud Operations and External Platforms, VHV Group
A Large Migration with Crucial Workloads and Strict Regulations
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.
Enabling Innovation and Accelerating DevOps
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.
Steady Progress for New Workloads
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 immediately.
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.”
About VHV Group
The VHV Group, based in Hanover, Germany, is a nationally and internationally active primary insurer and reinsurer in Germany. With 4,000 employees, it is one of the largest insurance companies in Germany. It operates separate brands in Austria and Turkey providing insurance, pension, and wealth management products.
About AWS Partner Netlution
Netlution is an enterprise-level adaptive provider of IT services. As an external partner, it aims to become an integral part of a customer’s organization for demanding, knowledge-intensive IT services. That means acting as a seamlessly integrated but independently functioning part of the customer’s IT infrastructure. It focuses on agile, digital, highly automated IT infrastructure and the use of innovative technologies.
AWS Services Used
SAP on AWS
Join thousands of customers who are accelerating their migration and business transformation on the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud for SAP.
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Amazon EC2
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) offers the broadest and deepest compute platform, with over 750 instances and choice of the latest processor, storage, networking, operating system, and purchase model to help you best match the needs of your workload.
AWS Systems Manager
AWS Systems Manager is a secure end-to-end management solution for resources on AWS and in multicloud and hybrid environments.
Learn more »
AWS CloudFormation
AWS CloudFormation lets you model, provision, and manage AWS and third-party resources by treating infrastructure as code.
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