University of Toronto unlocks visibility, operational efficiencies running SAP on Azure

The University of Toronto recently accelerated digital modernization across its teams and systems with a swift migration of its on-premises hardware to Microsoft Azure. In 2019, it became one of the first universities in the world to shift its expansive, business-critical SAP administrative management system to the cloud. A year later, the university accomplished a second, seamless migration as it shifted its SAP S/4HANA workloads to run on Azure. These SAP workloads underpin many essential functions across the university, including HR and payroll, facilities and services, and its student information system (SIS), which hosts grades, course enrollment, and fee payment data.

“To modernize our SAP system, we had to upgrade our hardware, and it would’ve been very expensive and time-consuming to do that on-premises,” explains Praveen Narayanaswamy, SAP Solution Architect at the University of Toronto. At the time, the university had a complex multiplatform SAP environment comprising AIX on IBM Power Systems hardware and other Linux deployments in its private cloud. “Ultimately, we wanted one common architecture and the ability to modernize quickly after we were in the cloud. Through Azure, we got the necessary flexibility and speed to market to achieve both goals.”

With all of its SAP workloads running on Azure, the University of Toronto’s IT team wanted to monitor and manage them in a more comprehensive and efficient way. So, the team adopted Azure Monitor to unlock visibility into the SAP workloads running on its Azure virtual machines (VMs) and gain better insights into telemetry than it had with previous solutions. “We had some monitoring in place on-premises, but it was quite limited and disjointed,” says Narayanaswamy. “Switching to Azure Monitor has completely changed our approach.”

Building and scaling a custom, future-fit cloud environment

The University of Toronto’s decision to run SAP S/4HANA on Azure quickly proved to be a critical advantage, as it provided the basis of a future platform without investing in highly specialized and costly equipment. The Enterprise IT teams now offer university-specific and user-friendly web applications with real-time analytics across campuses. With 51 systems in its SAP on Azure landscape, the university’s teams also now have the insights to do their jobs better and easier while staying more informed about activity across the entire environment. Service technicians in charge of plant maintenance, for example, now use tablets connected to SAP to perform problem resolutions and respond to requests in real time.

The university then shifted its focus to improving both monitoring and security for its SAP S/4HANA cloud environment, aiming to minimize risk and accelerate delivery while taking advantage of new insights. “We’ve largely been unable to afford the security capabilities we now have in Azure because it would take many resources to implement those on-premises and a lot of money to procure them in the first place,” says Frank Boshoff, Assistant Director of Technical Solutions and Architecture at the University of Toronto. “Teams are now able to experiment and learn with reduced costs, time, and risk, which is absolutely fundamental to us.”

Overcoming obstacles to unlock 360-degree visibility and always-on monitoring

To future-proof its cloud investments, the University of Toronto wanted a monitoring tool designed for enterprise scale to capture logs and provide telemetry around its services and IT infrastructure, including its application development platform. The university recognized that Azure offered in-depth monitoring built into the platform via Azure Monitor and quickly sought to enable it to optimize its SAP S/4HANA workloads and system performance.

After experiencing some performance issues during its rollout of the original Log Analytics agent, the University of Toronto worked with multiple Microsoft product teams to build the perfect, customized Azure monitoring solution centered around the more recently launched Azure Monitor agent. The Azure Monitor agent, which is backed by Premium SSD Azure Disk Storage and an updated set of comprehensive and extensive value adds, now runs on all of the university’s SAP VMs. The agent has quickly become an integral part of the university’s monitoring solution design, ensuring increased stability and laying an effective foundation for its journey toward higher observability.

The university also used Azure Logic Apps to quickly build several automated applications that consume alerts coming out of SAP Solution Manager and push them back to Azure Monitor to help its IT team better analyze performance data. “What we have now, thanks to our use of Azure Monitor and Logic Apps, is a 360-degree view of all the layers of our SAP environment, which is a fundamental improvement,” Narayanaswamy says.

Building on a strong foundation to move quickly and evolve easier

In the three years since the university’s migration of its SAP workloads to Azure and its adoption of Azure Monitor, it has avoided availability and performance issues and is able to respond more quickly to requests for new features. It’s also able to conduct critical tasks in support of its complete employee, HR, and financial lifecycle functions, such as employee onboarding, executing payroll, and delivering analytical reports to enable better decision making for business teams. Because of the university’s cloud-first approach and reliance on Azure workloads, its enterprise application development teams have improved their ability to identify bugs and fix them quickly—and even implement security on those assets in Azure—in minutes instead of days, without waiting for other teams to debug on their behalf.

On the security front, the University of Toronto’s teams get periodic emails generated through Azure that display the results of database security validations and highlight potential vulnerabilities that staff can then address. The university has also added more layers of security by using Microsoft Sentinel with its Azure Monitor agent. “By being better informed and having the ability to track our evolving landscape, we’ll be able to quickly identify if there are any issues and mitigate them,” says Boshoff. “We haven’t had a security incident with our Azure environment so far, which is a testament to the security that’s built into the platform. We wouldn’t have this level of insight into any of our on-premises databases.”

Establishing a technology strategy that aces every test

Reflecting on their progress, University of Toronto staff can’t help but highlight—and celebrate—the business value unlocked across the institution with SAP on Azure and Azure Monitor. As Boshoff remarks, “Even the infrastructure team running our remaining on-premises datacenters is starting to focus on Azure. It’s encouraging that everyone can see the benefits.”

The IT team cites the ability to easily build, scale, and change environments as the defining benefit of moving to Azure, and it’s ultimately responsible for making countless projects, proofs of concept, operation exercises, and other initiatives possible. “Our SAP operations, managed by a team of four, are fundamental to the university,” says Narayanaswamy. “The level of scale they’ve achieved so quickly since moving to Azure is a big advantage. We can spin up or increase the size of a VM in a matter of minutes rather than weeks, like it used to take on-premises.”

The university’s IT and administrative teams also recognize that they now have time to focus on higher value tasks rather than patching operating systems and managing compute capacity. “Payroll runs almost two times faster since moving to SAP on Azure and the Microsoft Cloud, and the financial month end runs about three times faster than before,” says Narayanaswamy.

“One of our goals has been to heighten observability with our operations and go from a reactive to predictive state,” notes Sarosh Jamal, Infrastructure Architect and Operations Lead at the University of Toronto. Concludes Narayanaswamy, “Much of that is falling into place now that we have unified monitoring and visual dashboards through Azure Monitor.”

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