HDT Global

HDT Global prepares for a cloud-first future with SAP on Azure Cloud

Together with HDT Global we enabled a seamless move of their SAP infrastructure to Microsoft Azure Government Cloud. This entailed taking responsibility for the design, build, migration and management of SAP, as well as the underlying Azure infrastructure. Combining extensive planning and SAP management expertise with hyper-coordination of all parties involved, ensured this was a seamless migration experience for HDT Global. As a result, the two-day cut over was completed one day early allowing more time for comprehensive validation of their production environment.

Architecting for SAP from the start

As Symmetry, HDT Global and Microsoft began working together to build the reference architecture, it was clear that the design warranted customizations outside the standards for Azure Government Cloud to include requirements specific to SAP. As with most SAP migrations, this would more complicated than a standard ‘lift and shift’ to a new cloud provider. There were necessary SAP upgrades and a back-end database change to prepare for the migration, and it was critical for HDT Global to maintain their transports between the existing and new platform to ensure minimal disruption during the process.

After presenting an updated reference architecture to the Microsoft Cloud Engineers that encompassed this SAP-centric design, Microsoft approved the architecture changes giving HDT Global the green light to proceed. Working with HDT Global’s existing SAP hosting provider, we began to coordinate the technical migration plan. During this phase of the process, the current state and planned work were evaluated with all parties to minimize risks or issues prior to migration. For HDT Global, this was more extensive and included upgrading and changing their SAP Kernel, database type and Operating System.

Lessons learned

Despite precautions, during migrations it is not uncommon for peripheral processes to fail. This is why it’s critical to have a seasoned partner by your side throughout the transition. During the migration, the FTP scripts were not completing successfully. By working closely together during Q&A testing, necessary firewall changes were identified to permit the passive network nature of FTP. For every organization, minimizing downtime at cut over is top of mind, and for HDT Global there were additional considerations outside of system downtime. Transitioning away from an existing hosting provider during the migration meant they would need to work overtime if the plan deviated from scope. Using data from previous export jobs of HDT Global landscapes, together we created a project plan to minimize these concerns, while discovering that the production system resources would allow for a faster import. As a result, the two-day cut over was completed one day early allowing more time for comprehensive validation of their production environment. Combining extensive planning and SAP management expertise with hyper-coordination of all parties involved, ensured this was a seamless migration experience for HDT Global.