Building a resilient hybrid SAP and Azure Local platform for a global enterprise.
- The enterprise needed to modernise large-scale SAP environments, improve resilience and support latency-sensitive factory operations.
- Nordcloud helped build a highly available Azure and Azure Local platform with stronger continuity, lower infrastructure risk and around 10% monthly cost savings.
Project Summary.
For a global enterprise running one of the world’s largest SAP landscapes, infrastructure resilience and operational continuity are business‑critical. Working alongside IBM, Nordcloud supported the customer in transforming a complex, on‑premises SAP estate into a modern, highly available hybrid environment on Microsoft Azure and Azure Local – designed to scale globally, withstand outages and support both corporate and factory operations.
The challenge.
The customer’s SAP environments formed the backbone of its global operations, supporting finance, logistics, manufacturing and supply chain processes across multiple continents. These systems were historically hosted in on‑premises data centres, creating several strategic and operational challenges:
Limited scalability and flexibility:
Growing SAP workloads required very large, specialised hardware that was costly to procure and maintain. Scaling capacity meant long lead times and significant capital investment.
Rising infrastructure risk:
Running business‑critical systems in local data centres increased exposure to hardware failures and made it harder to implement consistent disaster recovery at global scale.
Availability and resilience concerns:
Following cloud‑level outages in 2025, the customer needed stronger protection against regional and zonal failures to avoid business disruption.
Operational complexity:
The SAP landscape spanned thousands of virtual machines across regions, requiring a more standardised and automated approach to deployment and operations.
Factory and logistics constraints:
Some production and logistics systems could not depend solely on public cloud connectivity due to latency and connectivity requirements yet still needed to integrate with central IT platforms.
The customer set out to modernise SAP, reduce infrastructure risk, and create a hybrid model that combined global cloud scale with local operational reliability.
The solution.
Re‑architecting SAP on Microsoft Azure
Nordcloud supported the migration of the customer’s SAP infrastructure from on‑premises data centres to Microsoft Azure, working as the delivery partner responsible for architecture, automation and execution. Rather than lifting and shifting existing systems, the SAP environments were rebuilt as cloud‑native deployments, aligned with Microsoft best practices for SAP on Azure.
At the core of this approach was the SAP Deployment Automation Framework (SDAF). Nordcloud extensively customised the framework with additional Terraform, Ansible and DevOps tools to meet the customer’s specific requirements for disk layout, sizing logic, networking and operational standards. This enabled the team to deploy SAP environments – typically consisting of tens of virtual machines, shared storage and complex dependencies – in a highly repeatable and controlled way.
In total, around 1,000 large SAP virtual machines were deployed across multiple Azure regions, forming one of the largest SAP on Azure landscapes globally.
High availability, disaster recovery and cost optimisation
To address availability and resilience concerns, Nordcloud led a dedicated High Availability and Disk Optimisation initiative. SAP systems were redesigned to span multiple availability zones within regions, using SAP‑supported active‑passive and hot‑standby configurations for central services and databases.
Cross‑region disaster recovery, replication and Azure Site Recovery were implemented to ensure business continuity even in the event of major regional failures. At the same time, disk usage and VM sizing were reviewed based on real production data, allowing over‑provisioned resources to be right‑sized without impacting performance.
This combination of resilience improvements and optimisation significantly strengthened stability while reducing unnecessary spend.
Azure Local for factories and logistics
To support manufacturing plants and logistics locations where low latency and local availability are critical, the customer introduced Azure Local. Physical Azure‑enabled clusters were deployed directly at factory sites, allowing key workloads to run locally while remaining fully integrated with Azure for management and monitoring.
Nordcloud took responsibility for Azure Local operations across several locations globally, including patching, upgrades, capacity expansion and lifecycle management. The solution enables local systems to continue operating even if connectivity to the public cloud is disrupted, while still benefiting from Azure services, tooling and governance.
Azure Local now plays a central role in supporting production and logistics operations, bridging the gap between central cloud platforms and on‑site operational technology.
Managed cloud operations
Since late 2025, Nordcloud has provided 24/7 managed cloud support across both Azure and Azure Local environments. With the team of 14 engineers, we cover proactive monitoring, backup remediation, phased patching (close to 100%) and incident response for more than 2,000 virtual machines.
We introduced operational tooling such as Datadog and AI‑assisted ticket triage to improve visibility and response times in a demanding, high‑volume environment. To ensure continuous improvement and alignment with the customer’s evolving requirements, we have regular governance meetings.
Collaboration built on trust and expertise.
From the outset, the partnership was grounded in technical credibility and transparency. The customer placed its trust in Nordcloud’s deep SAP on Azure expertise, small but highly specialised delivery teams and disciplined engineering approach. Close collaboration with IBM, Microsoft and technology partners ensured that architectural decisions were validated, capacity constraints addressed and best practices consistently applied.
Over time, this trust translated into a long‑term engagement, with Nordcloud supporting both transformation initiatives and day‑to‑day operations in one of the most complex enterprise SAP environments in use today.
The results.
By combining cloud‑native SAP engineering, hybrid architecture and managed operations, Nordcloud helped the customer build a resilient, future‑ready platform – capable of supporting global business operations today and evolving with tomorrow’s demands.
Successful SAP migration with no data loss and minimal disruption to business operations
Improved resilience and availability, with multi‑zone and multi‑region protection in place
Approximately 10% reduction in monthly infrastructure costs, thanks to disk optimisations
Greater flexibility and scalability, removing dependency on costly on‑premises hardware
Reliable local operations for factories and logistics through Azure Local
Stronger operational stability with 24/7 managed cloud support with high patching coverage, improved backups and reduced outages
A long‑term managed services partnership, supporting continuous optimisation and future initiatives
