PIL Group is now running all its SAP systems on AWS and has decommissioned the on-premises infrastructure that once supported the SAP environment. In addition, 95 percent of all PIL applications and IT resources are running in the cloud. Says Fazley, “We’ve reduced the TCO for our SAP environment by 70 percent as a result of the migration to AWS. We’re expecting to save at least $650,000 over the next three years in hardware-related expenditure thanks to AWS.” Part of the savings stems from the elimination of overhead costs, such as tape backups. “We’re removing all of our tape-backup systems and now use Amazon S3 as our main backup data repository,” adds Fazley.

The savings will be used to drive strategic IT projects around technologies such as business-process management and IoT. For Fazley, AWS enables PIL Group to focus on the future, ensuring the company is ready to adopt the kind of solutions that will help improve decision making and performance. PIL Group had previously outsourced innovation projects to third party developers. “We are already training our IT personnel to support the adoption of business-process management and IoT,” Fazley says.

The SAP administration workload has shrunk considerably with the switch to AWS. “When we ran SAP environments in each of our three data centers, there was a lot of work because every time we made a change to one environment, we had to make the same change to the other two,” says Fazley. “Now we make just one change to the SAP environment on AWS, and that’s it. There is 300 percent less work to do.” The reduction in workload frees up time for IT staff to work on digitally transforming the business and improving data access for employees. “Since our SAP migration to AWS, administrators are spending much less time on routine management,” Fazley says. “I look around, and they’re not sitting at their desks working through everyday IT issues. They’re working on innovation projects and extending our usage of AWS services.”