Campari Group accelerates innovation with move to SAP on Azure and the Microsoft Cloud

Deleting the datacenters

In 2019, Campari Group made the strategic decision to adopt a cloud-first, zero-infrastructure approach. Years of growth meant reconciling and integrating the siloed applications, systems, and data of more than 30 acquisitions. Campari Group chose to standardize and centralize management of all its global brands’ IT services by embracing not just the Azure platform but the full Microsoft Cloud, extending the company’s capacity for innovation, efficiency, and security by tying in other services like those within Microsoft 365. 

Aging infrastructure and the ongoing need for greater capacity to support continuous growth convinced leadership to shift to running SAP on Azure. Matthew Zeidler, Senior Director of Enterprise Architecture and Technology at Campari Group, recalls, “Adding resources to our datacenter located in Zurich was very complex and time consuming, so in order to be more flexible and capable of providing additional resources upon request, it was clear that we needed to migrate to the Microsoft Cloud.”

Working with Capgemini, a member of the Microsoft Partner Network, Campari Group started to move its most critical SAP workloads to Azure. However, the company quickly realized the larger transformational value to be gained in terms of scale, cost, and resiliency. Zeidler recounts, “With the migration of SAP to Azure, the teams have shifted from planning hardware renewals to more value-adding activities. This has also enabled us to repurpose investments into business transformation initiatives.”

Through its success, Campari Group’s SAP migration quickly became the lodestar of the company’s cloud-first strategy, leading Campari Group to close two on-premises datacenters. Zeidler says, “Moving to SAP on Azure was one of our biggest and most consequential migrations because it changed our direction to the point where we could close our two global datacenters in Zurich and Amsterdam at the end of 2021.” With its SAP workloads now on Azure, Campari Group can take fuller advantage of the immediate and intelligent insights, enhanced productivity and collaboration, and accelerated automation and innovation available through the complementary Microsoft Cloud offerings, all underpinned by powerful security and compliance capabilities.

Head in the cloud

Through its Azure deployment, Campari Group has found the scale it needs to deliver a stronger SAP experience. For example, the company is building an SAP S/4HANA environment. To do so, it needs to scale out its infrastructure significantly to support a new instance, without affecting its daily SAP business operations. Matteo Spatti, Campari Group’s SAP Enterprise Architect, says, “Migrating to Azure was mandatory because we needed to create infrastructure for the future SAP S/4HANA migration, allowing us to increase the size of the virtual machines to reach the minimum downtime possible during go-live and then minimizing business impacts.” Campari Group found the added scale it needed effortlessly through Azure, and it managed to avoid any enduring COVID-19 supply chain challenges it might have faced through a physical datacenter expansion. Spatti observes, “With Azure and the Capgemini team, we built and moved our SAP environment in a few months, faster than if we’d had to build it on-premises.” 

Shuttering its datacenters and taking an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) approach through Azure helps Campari Group save and optimize costs. The company has redirected its former datacenter upgrades funds, investing instead in larger-scale network transformations to better complement the Azure software as a service (SaaS) applications it can now benefit from. Says Spatti, “With SAP on Azure, we gain the strength and simplicity of infrastructure as a service. We create a virtual machine to host the SAP workload and a dedicated virtual machine for SAP HANA, and that’s it. Moreover, Microsoft is releasing on a regular basis additional services dedicated to SAP workloads on Azure, which helps our own SAP systems to run smoothly and more efficiently.”

IT staff at Campari Group appreciate the ability to focus their efforts and resources on delivering optimized service to their SAP users instead of worrying about keeping datacenter lights on. This shift in mindset, from maintenance to continuous optimization, has placed Campari Group in the driver’s seat when it comes to deciding how best to adopt and incorporate Azure platform solutions and services. 

Enhanced security, reduced effort

Perhaps some of the biggest gains Campari Group has realized through its shift to the Microsoft Cloud have been security based. In 2020, the company experienced a major cybersecurity incident that demonstrated the power and value of its cloud-based Microsoft security features. At the time of the incident, most of the workloads that Campari Group had been running on-premises were affected by ransomware encryption. But everything it had already migrated to Azure and architected through a security-by-design, Zero Trust approach remained untouched. Zeidler states, “From a business standpoint, this incident gave us the confidence that running SAP on Azure and integrating additional elements of the Microsoft Cloud was the right direction. It solidified our effort and made us truly realize the value.” 

Campari Group uses Microsoft Sentinel, the cloud-native security and information event management solution, for standard configuration management, wherein all the telemetry gathered through Campari Group’s various Microsoft security and monitoring tools are assessed and analyzed. Spatti notes, “We have a much more secure infrastructure. We’ve been able to use Azure availability zones to improve resilience across our SAP infrastructure. That was not possible for us in our own datacenter.” 

The company also established a security operations center in only two weeks using Microsoft Sentinel and Microsoft Defender for Endpoint. It now has a single, enterprise-wide security view. The security center uses correlation rules, established through Microsoft Sentinel, to provide complete visibility and to help the company focus and prioritize threat management.

Zeidler says, “Given the utmost attention we want to have in this area, we rely on technology more and more to do the heavy lifting. So being able to avoid the numerous different tools and platforms and getting that single pane of glass view from Microsoft have been the greatest benefits.”

A real partnership

Through its cloud-first initiative, Campari Group is benefiting from enhanced security, increased consistency, improved business continuity, and greater cost-effectiveness. More importantly, the company has better ensured that it will be able to integrate future acquisitions more easily and securely. Campari Group has established the scale, security, and agility it needs to handle whatever comes next, along with readying itself for continuous optimization and ongoing transformation.

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