Government departments in New South Wales are moving to the cloud to realize better workflow solutions, and one company is paving the way for its success.
A new case study from cloud expert Accenture examines the monumental shift from critical departmental SAP systems to Microsoft Azure, where the company plays a crucial role in leading the way.
While government departments have continued to adopt a holistic SAP service based on Accenture Enterprise Services for Government (AESG), the fact that it is hosted in a private cloud offers limited opportunities to optimize performance and innovation in service offerings.
Because AESG enables departments and agencies to run functions such as finance, procurement, HR, and payroll from a single system, it is the responsibility to leverage and secure this fully.
To help achieve this, Accenture worked closely with stakeholders to thoroughly assess all options and suggested moving the solution to Microsoft Azure. The public cloud provided the opportunity to enhance and future-proof the AESG solution.
Migrations are never easy, but Accenture’s extensive customer knowledge, deep relationship with Microsoft, and SAP migration experience put the company in the best position to provide the ultimate service and assurance.
The team used Accenture myNav to assess and select Azure as the hosting platform for AESG and conducted proof-of-concept workshops with the departments and Microsoft to build a viable business case.
As with all migrations, there were major challenges to resolve and take action. One of these was the complex SAP S/4HANA data management and analytics platform. The team dealt with approximately 40 TB of data, over 400 interfaces, and nearly 90 production and non-production systems. To maximize certainty, two thousand six hundred test scenarios and seven simulated runs were also performed.
Extra pressure came from the continuity aspects because there were no development stops. After all, the payroll administration couldn’t stop. The customer also feared that a migration of this magnitude would seriously disrupt critical systems.
Thanks to Accenture’s signature collaborative approach, collaboration with Microsoft was seamless, and both companies worked innovatively as one team. Together they designed a hub-and-spoke model for the virtual data center where everything was centralized, including a security hub that allows the classification of multiple protections across the platform. The team has also adopted a low-level migration strategy, essentially migrating from the source hypervisor (VMWare) to the target hypervisor (Azure), reducing the chance of further issues.
Moving the SAP environment to the public cloud took place in less than six months, highlighting the power of teamwork and resilience. In addition, the team even ended up at several new agencies during the migration.
The public cloud enables enterprises to strengthen security, improve agility, expand operations, and meet customer requirements. An ERP service launched in 2015 on a private cloud with just a handful of NSW government agencies now serves more than 40 instances across multiple Microsoft Azure public cloud clusters.
With Accenture’s expertise, customers can be rewarded with high-quality processing of critical functions such as finance, HR, and payroll, leading to a smoother and richer user experience.
Is your company considering migrating? Contact Accenture here for more information.
