We moved a 13TB SAP landscape from Oracle to HANA on AWS — with no disruption to business operations.
The challenge
As part of a global initiative to consolidate data centres, the Australian division of a multinational manufacturer needed to migrate its core SAP landscape to align with centralised North American operations. The systems in scope were substantial: an Oracle-based SAP BW environment of approximately 8TB and an SAP CRM environment of approximately 5TB — a combined 13TB destined for SAP HANA on AWS. The migration had to be delivered with minimal capital expenditure, limited local IT resources, and no disruption to ongoing business operations.
This was not a lift-and-shift. Moving from Oracle to SAP HANA involved a fundamental change in database technology, with implications for data migration, application compatibility, and performance validation. The shift to AWS added further considerations around network architecture, security configuration, cost management, and operational procedures that differed significantly from the existing on-premises model. With constrained local IT capacity and both local and global stakeholders to convince, the program needed a low-risk path to production.
What we did
We designed a cloud-first architecture tailored to the organisation's specific constraints, then proved it before committing to a full cutover. A proof-of-concept environment let the local IT team validate SAP HANA on AWS against their own workloads and data volumes — critical for building stakeholder confidence ahead of production. Once validated, the migration ran in stages: Development and QA first to refine procedures and surface issues, then Production.
End-to-end delivery covered:
- Architecture review and migration mapping across both BW and CRM landscapes
- A cloud-native AWS environment built for evaluation, then scaled for production
- Automation for availability, scaling, and backups using cloud-native tooling
- Staged migration of 13TB across BW and CRM systems from Oracle to SAP HANA
- Scheduled shutdown of non-production systems during idle periods, removing compute cost without manual intervention
- Integration and alignment with the global data centre consolidation strategy
- Post-migration support through stabilisation
What it delivered
The migration completed with no disruption to ongoing operations and significantly reduced total cost of ownership compared to the previous on-premises model. Automation removed routine operational overhead, and scheduled shutdowns took compute cost out of non-production hours — together demonstrating the financial case for the cloud-first approach. The proof-of-concept model used here has since shaped how the organisation evaluates subsequent cloud migrations, establishing a validate-then-migrate pattern that reduces risk and builds stakeholder confidence on every new workload.
The full measure of the engagement
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