How a Fortune 500 Utility Achieved an On-Time, On-Budget RISE with SAP Go-Live
DownloadIndustry: Utilities, Gas & Electric
Company Size: 2K+ employees, >$2B revenue
Customer Profile
For one Fortune 500 company, navigating the unique challenges of SAP security for the utilities industry was a top priority as they faced the complex task of modernizing their twenty-year-old, on-premises SAP system. By partnering with Onapsis for both technology and expert guidance, the company successfully executed a greenfield RISE with SAP transformation, building security in from the start to achieve a secure, on-time, and on-budget go-live.
The Challenge: Modernizing a Complex Legacy System in the Cloud
The company’s greenfield migration to a new RISE with SAP environment meant starting fresh, but it also introduced new challenges. They recognized that under the cloud’s shared responsibility model, their teams needed to navigate new security and compliance requirements. Their primary challenges were:
- Modernizing a complex, 20-year-old SAP system without introducing new risks.
- Gaining a clear understanding of their team’s specific responsibilities under the shared responsibility model for application security in the RISE with SAP environment.
- Augmenting their skilled-but-overburdened staff with deep, hands-on expertise in securing a multi-year RISE deployment.
- Finding a single, trusted partner who could provide both industry-leading technology and expert strategic guidance.
The Solution: A Partnership of Technology and Expertise
Already a long-time Onapsis customer, the utility company expanded its partnership to leverage the unique combination of Onapsis technology and expert services for their cloud journey. The solution included two key components:
The Onapsis Platform
The company extended the Onapsis Platform to their new RISE environment, gaining centralized visibility and control over both their legacy systems and new cloud assets. This provided continuous monitoring and vulnerability scanning for critical components like SAP BTP and SAProuter, all managed from a single dashboard.
Onapsis RISE Experts
The utility enlisted Onapsis’s team of hands-on RISE experts to augment their internal staff. This provided them with SAP-security-focused expertise to guide them from the initial planning stages through go-live, helping to troubleshoot issues, recommend best practices, and prevent project delays.
The Results: A Secure, On-Time, and On-Budget Transformation
By building security into their project from the beginning, the utility company de-risked their migration and achieved significant time and cost savings.
Results at a Glance
- 75% Reduction in mean-time-to-remediate (MTTR).
- 50% Reduction in security investigation times.
- On-time and on-budget project delivery with practically no delays due to security or compliance issues.
- Centralized visibility across both legacy on-premise and new RISE with SAP systems.
- Significant time and cost savings achieved through automation and the elimination of manual processes.
“In the five years we’ve worked with Onapsis to secure our on-premises systems, we’ve not only experienced the day-to-day value of their technology – cutting our investigation times in half and reducing our mean-time-to- remediate by over 75% – but we’ve come to rely on them as true expert partners in shaping and optimizing our SAP security strategy. We knew we had to have them involved from the start when we began our RISE discussions and their guidance was invaluable, helping us to not only navigate but anticipate potential security and compliance obstacles so we could get ahead of them and avoid unexpected project delays.
– VP of Security, Utility Company
The automation and risk-based analysis provided by their solutions made it easy to build security checks into each stage of the product, so we could find and fix things quickly, our teams were aligned, and we were ultimately able to deliver our RISE project on time and on budget.”
Conclusion
By embedding security into their RISE with SAP project from day one, this Fortune 500 utility created a blueprint for successful cloud transformation. The combination of the Onapsis Platform’s automated analysis and the hands-on guidance from Onapsis experts not only improved their security posture but also acted as a project accelerator. The result was a seamless, on-time, and on-budget go-live that eliminated security as a roadblock and established a strong foundation for future innovation in the cloud.