Aflac

Vision

Reliable SAP solutions for a dependable company

To assist with the migration of their SAP BW and BPC environments to AWS, the business tapped SAP specialist provider and AWS SAP Competency Partner NTT. NTT brought a commitment to customer service that provided Aflac 24/7 support and a personalized contact to help them with any questions or concerns. Since NTT had handled a move of this complexity before, they were able to create a comprehensive plan that protected the daily operations of Aflac’s business while moving them to a more secure, robust SAP hosting solution. With around the clock support, Aflac was protected from disruptions to service and was able to move quickly without impacting internal teams.

Transformation

Migration without interruptions

Together, AWS and NTT were able to migrate this portion of Aflac’s SAP HANA environment in just five months. The combined experience of AWS and NTT made the process seamless, with internal teams able to continue with their regular work during the migration.

In addition to costs and cloud expertise, Aflac’s experience with using AWS Backint Agent was a motivator for choosing AWS. This powerful SAP-certified backup and restore solution for SAP HANA workloads, combined with Amazon Simple Storage Solution (Amazon S3), was a key differentiator for their transition from on-premises to the cloud.

Results

Real-time visibility means greater control over service costs

With the migration to AWS, Aflac was able to gain greater visibility into their SAP estate and infrastructure. The migration to AWS saved over 30% from their previous hosting solution, reducing overall costs while allowing Aflac to take advantage of AWS services like Amazon CloudTrail, for tracking user activity and API usage, and Amazon Route 53 cloud Domain Name System (DNS) web service.

Using AWS for SAP BW and BPC gave Aflac a greater sense of connection between their internal teams and their SAP estate. Aflac has greater insight into the workings of their SAP environment and can make real-time adjustments to their Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances that can impact costs and performance for the better, saving them an additional 5%. This transparency gave Aflac metrics and consumption data that they previously did not have. While Aflac expected to save with AWS, the combined efficiency and powerful integration tools enabled them to exceed their savings expectations.