innogy Czech's SAP systems were designed to be lean, secure, and highly available. By relying on AWS Direct Connect, the innogy Czech IT team was able to support those goals by building a stable, redundant, and encrypted connection between its existing data center and the AWS Cloud. Users can access the highly available system in the cloud from the safety of the corporate network.

innogy Czech is also now able to speed resource deployment. By adopting an "infrastructure as code" approach using AWS, the company has streamlined its change-management process, enabling rapid go-to-market deployments of both software and resources. Delivery of business services is also accelerated because hardware is no longer utilized to support the company’s SAP systems. As a result, technology is now an enabler of business innovation instead of a blocker.

innogy Czech was able to provision the new system in only a few weeks, compared to the months it would take to do so using the company’s previous data-center model. Additionally, by moving to Linux and the latest Oracle version, innogy Czech reduced its production SAP IS-U database by 30 percent.

Because of the flexibility of the cloud, innogy Czech only pays for the compute and storage resources it consumes. The company also now has cost and usage transparency, so it can immediately see its service consumption and can manage these resources more efficiently. Additionally, global best practices and previous migration cases show that compute resources on AWS cost 20 percent less than on-premises deployments, especially when migrating to the Linux platform.

On the customer side, the company’s new SAP cloud platform has simplified support processes and helped customers save money, because less effort is needed for support and more time can be spent on new IT activities.

innogy Czech is also improving its recruiting capabilities by being on the cloud. “As the public cloud becomes the new normal for application development, one of the less obvious impacts is that we can use the AWS Cloud as a way to attract and retain talent both internally and externally,” says Martin Goetz, CEO at innogy Czech. “We clearly see AWS as a crucial part of building our DevOps culture in the mid- to long-term future.”