Brooks Brothers now has the agility it requires to test and launch new projects in a short time frame. “With our SAP and SAP HANA systems on AWS, we can spin up instances in a matter of hours, which wasn’t an option in our previous world,” says Laher. “It would previously take weeks to set up a test environment on SAP HANA, including getting approvals to do the project and ordering and setting up the appliance.”

As a result, the company can fully evaluate new retail initiatives before putting them into production. “As we balance innovation with execution, we need to look at how viable some of our retail projects are before taking the plunge and getting them up and running,” says Miller. “Now, by running SAP on AWS, we can spin up instances, install solutions in a sandbox environment, and give our teams exposure to those solutions very quickly.” Adds Laher, “Using AWS to support our SAP environments, we can be more nimble, which opens up many more possibilities for our business. We can get new initiatives to production faster, and if some things aren’t providing the desired business results in pilot mode, we can quickly shut those down.”

Brooks Brothers is also reducing its operational costs. “Using AWS, we can rapidly join the blueprinting, fit gap analysis, and functional design specification work in an environment that looks like a proof-of-concept platform, without investing thousands of dollars in new hardware in the data center,” says Miller. “That frees up capital for us to invest in other parts of the business that can drive more revenue.”

The organization can now scale its applications globally whenever necessary. “The geographic network capacity in AWS is very important to us,” Miller says. “For example, with AWS Direct Connect, interregional communications will traverse the AWS backbone, which is always going to be bigger and more widely distributed than what we could ever offer.” And expanding SAP applications to more users will also be simple. “At the drop of a hat, we can scale to the point where we can get more capacity without any downtime,” says Laher. “Using AWS, we can work toward a single-instance global model where we can install once and deploy anywhere.”

The company can also ensure strong security for its CRM solution and future SAP applications. “All our customer data is sitting on the AWS cloud, which shows how confident we are in the security we get from AWS,” says Miller. “Additionally, we didn’t need to hire someone just to work on security for our new applications. When we wanted to enable second-factor authentication, we were able to deploy it in AWS very quickly.”

As it moves additional business-critical SAP applications to AWS, Brooks Brothers expects to continue to save time and money and be able to direct more energy toward its goals. “Using AWS helps us concentrate more on our priorities,” says Laher. “Instead of putting our resources into maintaining our infrastructure, we can focus solely on initiatives that can elevate our business and add more value to our customers.”