Challenge
A Canadian mining company with operations in Europe, Asia and South America relied heavily on the enterprise integration of its SAP application environment. The company felt that managing its own SAP data center infrastructure distracted its IT staff from mining the full potential of their SAP apps to further the company’s overall business strategy.
Four key issues informed the company’s drive to revamp its IT operations:
- Global and decentralized workforce: The company has 18 offices and 7,000 employees scattered around the globe. Their structure requires enterprise software that provides a common working environment that meets the needs of a dispersed, decentralized workforce.
- “Fighting fires” in the data center: Keeping data center technologies running at full capacity required constant attention from the mining company’s IT professionals. Time lost to data center management could not be devoted to improving business outcomes.
- SAP-certified infrastructure: SAP, the global business technology giant, provides a rich suite of applications that make large companies more efficient and profitable. The mining company needed a partner with significant experience with mission critical data center infrastructure services.
- Specialized demands: Each mine production site has unique requirements because of local geology, regulations and economic resources. SAP apps must be carefully calibrated to meet users’ precise needs.
- Data volume: The enterprise needed a robust data backup solution to support the large volume of critical information that the company’s large, worldwide workforce generates.
Solution
The Canadian mining company decided it could not meet its rising IT needs if it had to keep devoting time, money and headcount to managing a data center. OnX came through with a fully managed solution that met the company’s global requirements.
OnX’s managed services solution provided three crucial services:
- High-availability data center: OnX deployed an SAP managed cloud environment in its Toronto data center. The SAP environment meets SSAE16 SOC 2 Type Two audit requirements.
- Backup and data recovery services: Policy-driven data backups are securely transmitted to tiered storage in the cloud at OnX’s data center in Ottawa. Automation from powerful Commvault software enables storage and recovery.
- Security: With OnX’s leading managed services experience and SAP-certified infrastructure, the mining company can rest assured that the data and systems that keep their business moving forward will always be available and secure.
Results
The mining company has a results-driven relationship with OnX, whose SAP certifications and advanced technology acumen have produced a robust computing environment that elevates the company’s capabilities around the globe.
Working hand-in-hand with OnX, the mining company “right-sized” its SAP managed cloud environment, freeing up resources and allowing additional countries to be implemented within a similar footprint — producing significant cost efficiencies.
And the hand-off to OnX’s high-availability data center gives the company a firm handle on capital expenditures.
“In today’s market, all organizations want an enterprise-class level of service regardless of their size. They want the best-in-class applications at the lowest possible cost. But your operations infrastructure must be carefully engineered and aligned with your business requirements to strike that balance. With OnX setting up and managing our SAP infrastructure data center environment, we have a flexible, responsive and robust solution that addresses our needs for worldwide performance, security and high availability.” (Mining company’s Global Manager, Information Technology)