Midas Safety Lowers TCO by 40% running SAP on AWS

Midas Safety, a leading industrial safety glove manufacturer, has been offering private-label manufacturing to partners in more than 80 countries for over four decades. Midas has manufacturing facilities in Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and India that employ more than 10,000 employees. These facilities are equipped with state-of-the-art technology, such as robotics, and are recognized for their adherence to environmental and occupational safety standards.

As part of its commitment to quality and innovative solutions, Midas embarked on its SAP journey in 2010 to streamline global operations. The company uses several SAP modules, including SAP Production Planning, SAP BusinessObjects, and SAP SuccessFactors Human Experience Management. “SAP is integral to the functioning of our manufacturing operations, human resources, and overall business,” says Arjuna Jayasinghe, chief information officer at Midas Safety.

The company first implemented SAP in an on-premises data center at its factory in the Pakistan Export Processing Zone (EPZ). All of Midas Safety’s global offices and manufacturing facilities are connected to its SAP system hosted in the EPZ. However, the company encountered many challenges while SAP was running from the on-premises environment.

“We experienced disruptions that caused weeks of downtime, negatively impacting users worldwide,” Arjuna says. “In a disaster, all locations outside Pakistan would lose connectivity to SAP.” Furthermore, the company’s hardware was becoming obsolete and needed to be replaced. Due to the hardware’s fixed capacity, the team faced scalability issues when they had to roll out new processes in response to business growth.

The team sought a solution that would help them solve scalability issues, meet security requirements, improve the company’s disaster recovery posture, and remove the burden of hardware management, technology procurement, and maintenance.

To alleviate these challenges, Midas evaluated different options and eventually chose a phased approach to cloud migration. The team started by migrating to a private cloud environment and then migrated to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud.

“We chose to move our SAP environment to AWS to take advantage of the scalability, reliability, and integration capabilities AWS provides,” says Jayasinghe. The global reach of AWS and its ability to support a robust disaster recovery plan helped Midas address some of the most pressing issues faced in its previous on-premises environment. In migrating to AWS, the team also took the opportunity to upgrade to SAP ECC 6.0 EhP7 with an SAP HANA database and SAP Business Warehouse 7.4. With the upgrade, the team hoped to optimize performance and create new business value through advanced technology.

To plan a smooth migration of its SAP on AWS environment, Midas chose to work with InfraBeat, an Advanced Consulting Partner in the AWS Partner Network (APN) and an AWS SAP Competency Partner. “We felt InfraBeat would bring us both the SAP and AWS expertise we needed to ensure we made the most of our migration,” says Jayasinghe. “We found InfraBeat’s team of consultants to have a strong SAP skill set, including knowing how to optimally deploy SAP products on AWS."

Midas runs its SAP HANA database on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) memory-optimized R4 instances. Also, by using AWS Direct Connect, the company established a private connection between AWS and the Midas network, giving Midas employees direct access to SAP systems. To power its SAP modules, Midas uses several AWS services, including Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for data backups, Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), and Amazon WorkSpaces to provide virtual desktops to employees.

By migrating its SAP environment to AWS, Midas has drastically reduced its costs. “We’ve found our total cost of ownership (TCO) to be about 40 percent lower on AWS compared to running SAP in an on-premises data center,” says Jayasinghe. “With the SAP HANA platform on AWS, we’ve achieved better throughput and shorter runtime across SAP business processes.”

Using storage replication, the company now has its disaster recovery infrastructure running at a fraction of the cost of its previous solution. In addition, Midas Safety has also architected its environment for high availability, ensuring 99.9 percent system uptime. It also has the flexibility to scale up and down in line with growth requirements, and not be constrained by capacity restrictions.

Furthermore, Midas has received an ISO 27001:2013 certification. “Moving to AWS helped us obtain this crucial certification because AWS manages many of the underlying components,” says Selvaratnam Sashikumar, head of risk and compliance at Midas Safety. “Moving to AWS has been key in our ability to improve our compliance practices, which is an important expectation from our strategic customers.”

As Midas’s managed service provider, InfraBeat continues to play an important role in helping the company optimize its use of AWS services and resources. Working with InfraBeat frees up the IT team at Midas, empowering them to play a more integral role in helping define how technology is used to further business goals. Jayasinghe concludes, “The partnership with InfraBeat has brought us more value than a traditional partnership in terms of dynamic optimization of information technology, so we can steer toward our business strategic direction and operational excellence.”

To learn more, visit SAP on AWS.