Javed Iqbal<\/a> has managed to carve it down considerably in the last 10 years.<\/p>\nHere, Javed shares how he took BAT from a global portfolio of datacentres and factories running different technologies to a single, streamlined cloud estate.<\/p>\n
Embrace the change<\/p>\n
It all started with BAT’s push to the cloud, which began 10 years ago. Like \u201ceverybody\u201d in \u201cthe good old days,\u201d BAT operated a network of on-prem datacentres in factories, business premises and sales offices.<\/p>\n
The agility and scalability of cloud was a big pull factor; suddenly, the team could do in minutes or hours what had previously taken days or weeks \u2013 and they could do it for less money.<\/p>\n
The security boost also helped. The cyber environment has become \u201cmore challenging\u201d in the last decade, especially for a firm that was trying to protect datacentres in 100+ different locales with diverse technology sets. Working with partners like Microsoft and AWS to protect cloud environments has been \u201ca major step change.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cEven if I had doubled my cyber spend on my datacentres in terms of protection, I wouldn’t be at the level where I am today.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pit partners against each other<\/p>\n
Involving two of cloud\u2019s biggest beasts turns out to have been a smart move on Javed\u2019s part, giving BAT \u201ca nice competitive tension between the two big service providers.\u201d<\/p>\n
Both AWS (mostly responsible for the North American business) and Microsoft Azure (running the rest of the world) are \u201cgreat services,\u201d but \u201c90% of the things [they provide] are almost the same.\u201d<\/p>\n
Javed used that similarity to get the most out of his investments, placing the majority of his estate with the provider that could offer the most value.<\/p>\n
Sharing BAT’s transformation roadmap with partners was also a big help in guiding investment:<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you have a roadmap, you can actually go and see what else you can do with that service provider for your overall digital plan, versus just treating it as one transaction…<\/p>\n
\u201cOther than just doing the technical move from local datacentres to cloud, we also were able to work on certain IT projects…with the sponsorship of our partners on cloud.\u201d<\/p>\n
Javed admits BAT\u2019s size \u2013 it’s part of the FTSE 100 \u2013 was a tremendous help in this period, as partners were incentivised to invest in areas that would assist such an important customer. Microsoft\u2019s commercial account team, for example, put $5 million into a project BAT was working on because of how much it was moving into the Azure environment.<\/p>\n
Leave the complexity till last<\/p>\n
By December BAT had moved 60% of its estate to cloud. That jumped closer to 80% this year, when the company moved its on-prem SAP instance into SAP Rise; and Javed thinks they\u2019ll hit 85% by the end of 2025.<\/p>\n
The SAP migration was “one of the most complex movements\u201d of the transition, taking about 18 months from planning to execution.<\/p>\n
\u201c[BAT\u2019s SAP instance] has roughly 18,000 interfaces and 154,000 transactions happening every day… How do you move that?\u201d<\/p>\n
For Javed, it meant working closely with AWS and Microsoft, as well as SAP itself, to develop \u201cdetailed planning,\u201d which sped the process up over time.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat I think we got better at is not moving bigger data sets; we got better at planning how to migrate on the cloud environment.\u201d<\/p>\n
SAP wasn\u2019t the only difficult part of the cloud journey; there was a physical element to it, too.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur biggest challenge was our factories. Most of our factories are in remote locations and we were initially under the impression that you need a local datacentre for your factory operations. That was one of the…barriers we saw in the early days, but last year we successfully removed that barrier.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur factory in Mexico became the first factory that is now on cloud.\u201d<\/p>\n
The factories represent most of the final 15% of the IT estate BAT has to move to the cloud, but the pace is picking up. There are now three fully in the cloud, and Javed expects to reach 95% cloud operations within the next two years.<\/p>\n
When I ask him for the biggest lesson he\u2019s learned from 10 years of migration work, there isn\u2019t even a hint of a pause:<\/p>\n
\u201cDon\u2019t start by moving your SAP Enterprise – start small. And I\u2019d strongly encourage not having a local datacentre at all.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Playing partners off against each other Image: Using both AWS and Microsoft Azure meant BAT could foster \u201ccompetitive…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":65623,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3164],"tags":[4121,14270,3284,10443,27278,6657,33546,19183,53,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-65622","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-computing","8":"tag-aws","9":"tag-cloud-computing","10":"tag-computing","11":"tag-digital-transformation","12":"tag-microsoft-azure","13":"tag-migration","14":"tag-multi-cloud","15":"tag-sap","16":"tag-technology","17":"tag-uk","18":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114432517307951038","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65622","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65622"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65622\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/65623"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65622"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65622"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65622"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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