Saras Accelerates Digital Transformation, Supports Growth, and Improves Performance Using AWS

With the aim of expanding its business and improving operations, Saras chose to migrate its on-premises infrastructure—including its SAP environment and critical applications—to AWS. As a result, the Italy-based multinational energy company has increased application performance by 30 percent, boosted scalability, and reduced operational costs. Saras is now looking to AWS machine learning services to continue its digital transformation and drive ongoing innovation and efficiencies.

Saras is an Italian multinational energy company and one of the leading independent players in the European energy and refining industry. Founded in 1962, the Group changed its operational model with focus on environment and innovation, with a turnover of more than €5 billion.

As part of its digital transformation strategy to increase business agility and improve operations, Saras decided to move its on-premises infrastructure to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and in 2018 migrated to the cloud its applications, which were all on-premise and hosted in a data center with related Disaster Recovery With a phased approach and support from AWS.

With a phased approach ended in 2019 and supported by AWS, Saras migrated 98 percent of its workloads critical production and SAP environments by June 2020. As a result, Saras has boosted infrastructure performance and scalability, as well as reduced its operational costs. The company is now looking to make use of machine learning capabilities in the cloud to drive ongoing innovation and optimization.

The organization’s existing infrastructure was largely on-premises, hosted in a primary data center in Sardinia with disaster recovery at a secondary site. To meet its growth and diversification targets, Saras needed to modernize its entire application portfolio, increasing performance and scalability, as well as reducing costs.

“Our move to the cloud was part of a cultural and technological transformation for the business,” says Franca Rosina, Head of Information and Communications Technology at Saras. “After months of analysis of the cloud services market, AWS proved to be the most suitable partner for us. It was clear that its advanced services would support our growth as we transitioned from our on-premises infrastructure to the cloud.”

The company planned its cloud migration in four phases. “First, we created the environment and developed the Saras Data Platform in the cloud, after which we migrated about 30—mainly production—workloads,” says Cristian Bionda, head of architecture, BI & application operations at Saras. “We then moved on to migrating our SAP environment, before finally transitioning our remaining critical production workflows.”

Saras core business is represented by the Sarroch refinery near Cagliari. It means that the most demanding and significant part of the IT application portfolio is the one destined for data collection in the production phases and their processing. Even the next "layer" of the digital workflow, that is, the transformation of this data into business information and the intersection with trading and administrative commercial data, is essential for maintaining competitiveness and flexibility.

Since it migrated its applications to AWS—which, according to Bionda, was an easy lift-and-shift process—the company has received positive feedback from staff. “About 80 percent of employees use the new applications in production processes, many with mobile devices even within the plant,” says Bionda. “Access to management software, including SAP, is mainly from the headquarters and peripheral offices of the group, located in Europe. Staff reported a significant increase in the performance of many migrated applications, with an improvement of 30 percent compared to the previous infrastructure.”

The company uses Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in seconds. “Being able to provision and de-provision resources is essential for efficient operations,” says Bionda. “Before, it used to take days to relocate a machine, but now it takes only a few hours. This allows us to change the infrastructure if the number of users of a service or application increase, but also to dedicate resources for a short time when needed.” In addition, using solutions like AWS Elastic Beanstalk, which makes it easy to deploy and scale web applications, Saras can focus on its business rather than provisioning and managing infrastructure. 

By migrating to AWS, Saras was able to close one of its data centers and optimize the remaining one at its headquarters. This has contributed to the company’s sustainability targets by reducing its energy consumption and CO2 emissions. “Sustainability is at the core of our values. Being able to get closer to reaching our goals puts our business in a good place,” says Bionda.

As part of its ongoing modernization, Saras is looking to engage AWS Enterprise Support. This will help it further improve its infrastructure governance, upskill talent, and accelerate innovation—which includes exploring machine learning capabilities.  

Bionda says, “In the future we will continue to optimize costs and thanks to AWS, we’re more in control of our infrastructure and further along in our digital transformation journey. We will continue to optimize costs, update applications, and innovate.”