Waseda University strengthens business continuity planning and disaster recovery, improves operational efficiency with SAP on Azure

“As we break down Waseda Vision 150 into system initiatives, we’ve actively promoted the use of cloud services,” says Hiroto Shibayama, Manager IT Strategies Division at Waseda University. “Here, we decided to actively migrate our on-premises SAP system infrastructure to the cloud. By migrating to the cloud, we expect to save time and money with server maintenance and operations management and be able to operate our system more efficiently. Additionally, under a three-year plan that started in 2021, the company is promoting BCP measures for its IT infrastructure to ensure business continuity. We thought we’d be able to realize BCP and disaster recovery measures that were difficult in an on-premises environment, ensure system scalability, back up data using multiple regions, and improve operability via remote maintenance.”

Despite Waseda University’s push to promote multicloud and multivendor support without vendor lock-in, Azure was determined to be the best cloud platform for the SAP system with an excellent vendor and the right people to meet the university’s needs.

Migrating on-premises SAP to Azure

With more than 50,000 students, 5,300 faculty including part-time faculty, and 670,000 graduates, Waseda University is a diverse and large-scale educational and research institution. The accounting scale of the university is also large, with recurring revenues in fiscal year 2021 totaling ¥101.2 billion. This includes approximately ¥64 billion in tuition and admission fees, approximately ¥12 billion in subsidies, approximately ¥7 billion in contracted research projects, and approximately ¥3.7 billion in entrance and other exam fees.

“We have various faculty and graduate schools, and the business logic was complex,” says Shibayama. “In implementing SAP, we aimed to create a system for school corporate accounting and build it as a standard operation. In terms of the structure, SAP is used for the financial accounting system, and five large corporate systems are placed around it. The corporate systems include a support system for managing faculty research expenses, a system for managing business trip expenses and settlement procedures by workflow, a system for managing various documents, a workflow system used for approval procedures, and a Zengin system connected to Zengin-Net. By closely linking systems and data with SAP, the financial status is obtained in real time. In making the move to the cloud, it was necessary to migrate all of these corporate systems together around the SAP system.”

The number of SAP system users are limited to approximately 400 staff and 1,000 faculty, but the SAP system itself was well built at the time of deployment, and there were no challenges on the application side. “The focus of the cloud migration is stable operation as a corporate system without any problems,” says Kazuhiro Isozaki, a member of the Application Group in the Information Planning Section of the Information Planning Department at Waseda University, describing the requirements for moving to the cloud. “We selected Azure after evaluating whether it could provide the enhanced BCP measures needed with the cloud, cost optimization, a departure from hardware operational maintenance, and improved stability. The deciding factor to use Azure was its proven track record as an operating platform for SAP in other systems at the university. The increased sense of trust in the architectural design session was also a major factor.” 

Solving migration issues with architectural design and partner support

An architectural design session is a meeting to confirm business goals, system architecture, and a service deployment method through two days of discussions with Microsoft SAP experts. Microsoft presents several plans that can be realized with SAP on Azure, in addition to a simple cost estimate and ROI for each and other detailed figures.

Isozaki recalls that Waseda University’s design session provided an understanding of Azure functionality and painted a picture of the migration policy and method. The participants were able to understand the example configuration and get a sense of the amount of money for each, enabling them to share a clear vision for the future. However, some issues couldn’t be technically addressed at the actual start of the migration process.

The first was that part of Microsoft’s standard migration tool, Azure Site Recovery, couldn’t be used. “The SAP system was largely composed of virtualized instances of Windows Server, but the HANA server operated on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and migration using Site Recovery couldn’t be implemented for some storage areas that used a specific mounting method,” says Isozaki. “Because it would be technically difficult to address the issue ourselves, we turned to Microsoft for support and were introduced to BeeX as a partner. BeeX offered accurate advice because of its extensive experience with SAP, and it was dependable when asked for information. A sense of trust was built through the communication process, and we decided to ask them to assist us with the migration.” BeeX quickly solved the migration issue of the HANA server by moving the application servers using Site Recovery while migrating the HANA server according to the migration pattern defined by SAP.

“We have extensive experience as an SAP partner,” says Yasutoshi Tamura, Senior Technical Consultant at BeeX Inc. “We were able to smoothly complete the migration by utilizing our accumulated migration know-how. We achieved a trouble-free migration by preparing a version of the operating system in the HANA version on Azure.” Adds BeeX Inc. Associate Tomomi Okawa, “With the exception of HANA, Oracle Database was used as the standard database in the corporate system. The Azure migration couldn’t be performed using Site Recovery during acceptable downtime due to the large size, but the migration was performed by outputting the disk to a VHD file, transferring the data to Azure Blob Storage, and mounting it from the VHD file. We were able to use BeeX’s migration expertise here, too.”

The benefits of SAP on Azure

The architectural design session with Microsoft got underway at the end of 2019. With the onset of COVID-19, the project shifted to being fully remote, but it proceeded smoothly through web conferences and chats. For the project promotion system, BeeX was in charge of SAP-related migration work and technical support, and Waseda University Academic Solutions Corporation, an affiliate of Waseda University, was in charge of non-SAP migration work, while the Information Planning Division was in charge of overall management.

Requirement definitions were implemented by December 2020, and a migration proof of concept, including copying of the production environment, was implemented by March 2021. Migration design and design and development of program modifications in accordance with the migration started in April 2021, and migration rehearsal and testing started in June. All migration projects were completed by the start of October 2021, and the migration itself was accomplished in a short period of approximately six months.

Shibayama and Isozaki cite three benefits of SAP on Azure, the first of which is the strengthening of business continuity planning (BCP) measures. The university’s on-premises environment was unable to provide SAP system redundancy—backups could only be performed at the school, and if the school’s servers were to suffer damage, they couldn’t be restored. “After migrating to Azure, we used geo-redundant storage in Azure Backup to be able to retain backup data in East and West Japan, thereby enhancing our disaster recovery measures,” says Shibayama.

The second benefit is cost optimization. By migrating to Azure, the total cost (the initial cost and the five-year running cost) is expected to be lower compared to the previous system. “In the future, we expect to further reduce costs by using reserved instances and suspending instances during unused hours, mainly for development and verification equipment,” says Isozaki.

The third benefit is breaking away from hardware operational maintenance and improving operability. By migrating to the cloud, hardware operational maintenance is no longer needed. Additionally, the separate vendors for hardware and base software applications in the conventional system have been consolidated to one vendor, and the operation system was reviewed. “Management functions that were spread over multiple tools are now centralized in the Azure portal, and virtual machine and database backups can be performed solely with Azure functions without having to use other backup tools, greatly contributing to operability,” says Isozaki.

Getting more out of Azure with Azure Virtual Desktop and Power Automate

Now that SAP on Azure has been realized, Waseda University plans to promote initiatives to use the Azure platform. The first initiative is to use reserved instances to further optimize costs and improve operability. The university is also looking to take advantage of Azure-native services.

“In terms of improving the university’s educational environment, Azure Virtual Desktop can be used to promote BYOD,” says Shibayama. “Migrating our corporate system has made it easier to use other Azure services. Additionally, we’re already looking into using Power Automate to automate SAP input operations and other work.” According to BeeX, the university’s SAP on Azure environment is evolving every day, and user convenience has greatly improved. For example, in overseas regions, a new function was released to enable operation monitoring of the SAP environment using Azure Monitor.

“The advantage of using Azure as the base of SAP is its ability to centrally manage the SAP environment with Azure functions,” says Tamura. “Azure Backup can back up SQL Server and HANA databases from a virtual machine, and geo-redundant storage can easily build a disaster recovery environment at low cost. This convenience and high reliability are outstanding points compared to other SAP cloud environments.”

The university is currently in the process of upgrading its SAP applications and plans to upgrade its corporate systems. Additionally, Microsoft, who has several educational institutions as clients, shares the latest technology and industry trends in education, research, and university management, and it engages in joint research. And it’s looking forward to providing ongoing support for Azure, Power Automate, and Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams, which are already in use at Waseda University, and strengthening its support system to help the university realize its Waseda Vision 150 plan.