Migrating off SAP to AWS Redshift

Over the past few years, we’ve observed a significant wave of security teams leading the charge in migrating their organizations’ data from on-premise SAP environments to Amazon Redshift.

Companies are dealing with more and more sensitive data, including critical PHI and PII, distributed across an increasing number of on-prem databases, data warehouses, and data lakes. This makes it harder not only to keep data organized for efficient use, but especially to make sure it’s secure and complies with all the relevant regulations.

We all know about the shift to cloud that’s been going on for close to two decades now, and SAP is no exception. Companies that already have legacy SAP architecture are predominantly on-prem and require increasing hardware updates, software, and firmware maintenance. This is further compounded by the specific knowledge from IT and Operations necessary to maintain and troubleshoot any issues within these systems.

When SAP started migrating their on-prem customers to a cloud infrastructure, it triggered many companies to investigate their data needs and look for better, faster, and more future-proof or cost-effective solutions. This has led to an exodus of customers migrating off of SAP.

Data warehouse migrations are usually huge projects, often taking months (or years). They also tend to come from the top-down, with executives looking to drive innovation and productivity through better analytics, faster access to data, and scaling, as well as reducing overall data costs.

One of the main issues with migrating off SAP is that it’s a proprietary technology with many objects, permissions, and security features that increase the complexity of migration. Even if a more modern data warehouse is better suited for the company, the level of complexity, risk exposure, and detailed knowledge needed to migrate off of SAP provides a huge stumbling block. Some of the challenges we’ve come across:

• Data teams struggling to apply customized data access controls across their SAP data during the migration to Redshift
• Burden on data engineering teams to ensure security and compliance while enabling data sharing during the migration
• Lost productivity from having significantly delayed and reduced ability to share data within the organization during the migration process
• Organizations deterred from migrating off SAP by the costs, specialty knowledge, time, and resources required, even if the discounted value of the benefits is greater
• Security risks during migration, when sensitive information is significantly more exposed to security threats 

Migrating data is quite a task by itself. And when you add the complexities of data governance, data enforcement, security auditing, and access controls, it becomes a daunting task.

So why, then, are companies moving to migrate off SAP?

1. No more hardware or software to install, configure, manage, maintain, or upgrade. This reduces costs from purchasing these tools and also significantly saves on security engineering teams’ time and resources so that they can focus on more productive projects. 
2. Redshift allows the collection of different types and structures of data, including semi-structured data. If used together with a data security platform, this data is automatically included in an updated data inventory. Some data types include JSON, XML, Parquet, and Avro.
3. Reduced costs. The cost of operating and maintaining SAP, as well as data storage costs, are significantly reduced through using a pay-as-you-go model such as Redshift. The ability to shift the overall operation and maintenance of the warehouse significantly reduces costs. 

Ok, so say you’ve decided to migrate your data from SAP to Amazon Redshift. Now the question becomes: “How do I get the new data into Redshift quickly, safely, and (relatively) cheaply?” You want to get the benefits of an AWS Redshift warehouse as quickly as possible, without experiencing overly long or risky downtime.

Satori keeps your sensitive data secure and compliant during and after the migration from SAP to AWS Redshift. 

Here’s how it works:

1. Decoupled from the data plane. This means data access controls and data governance are automated from the beginning of the migrations, ensuring that all data is secured. More importantly, it means data can still be shared easily across different departments through self-service and fine-grained data access controls.
2. Flexible deployment options. Satori can be deployed as a SaaS or as an isolated layer within your VPC, preventing the need to expose your Redshift cluster to the internet.

3. Continuously sensitive data discovery and classification. Satori’s automated data classification enables you to discover and classify sensitive data without scanning it manually. It easily seeks out and finds all sensitive data, including semi-structured data types, and automatically applies security policies on the newly discovered sensitive data.

Satori allows data migration from SAP to AWS Redshift to occur quickly with minimal downtime, ensuring that data security isn’t lost in the migration.

Choosing to migrate off of SAP to AWS Redshift is a big decision. Once the migration is complete, it promises enhanced efficiency and reduced costs, but the actual process can present technical complexities and security risks.

To learn how Satori can help you migrate data platforms securely, book a demo with our team.