By deploying its SAP applications in the AWS cloud, B&A has obtained a high-availability environment critical to the smooth operations of its business. While the AWS platform has delivered 100 percent uptime, the SAP deployment is engineered to rapidly recover even from the loss of an entire AWS Availability Zone. “Failover is a huge benefit and something we didn’t have before,” says Sinclair. “And we’ve had no unscheduled downtime yet, which is big. If the system went down, we would face compliance and financial impacts.”

B&A has also obtained a cost-effective platform for its SAP environment. Rather than maintaining its own data center and servers, the company now pays only for the services it uses, leaving maintenance to AWS. “With AWS, we’ve been able to substantially reduce our IT footprint from both a maintenance and physical space perspective,” Sinclair says. “This, in turn, has allowed us to focus on our core business.”

For any consulting firm, the accurate capture of billable hours is key to the success of the business. And with the AWS cloud and SAP Fiori, B&A employees can now record their time from mobile devices wherever they are. Moreover, with its systems now integrated, the company has greater insight into its financial performance, allowing it to take quick action when performance drops. “We now have the ability to drill into our numbers instead of seeing them at a high level,” Sinclair says.

With the inexpensive and easily configurable cloud architecture that AWS provides, B&A also stood up their own development platform with which to test and deploy new IT solutions. This, in turn, is allowing the company to rapidly accelerate customer project timelines. “The unlimited capacity of the AWS cloud simplifies our resource management,

while the hourly utilization model creates new opportunities for research and development,” Sinclair says.

Finally, AWS has provided B&A with an agile platform that allows it to scale up as the company continues to grow. “We wanted the flexibility to scale what we needed, whenever we needed it, and the AWS cloud has enabled us to do that,” says Sinclair. “AWS has provided us with a highly available, scalable infrastructure that’s positioning us for future growth.”