Unilever migrates its SAP estate to Azure in 18 months, fueling unconstrained capacity for business growth

Laying the groundwork for digital transformation with Azure

Unilever’s brands collectively stand at more than 400 of the world’s leading beauty, wellness, food, nutrition, and household care product suppliers, including Dove, Dermalogica, Knorr, and Ben & Jerry’s. They’re all united by Unilever’s vision to deliver progressive, high-quality products and prioritize sustainable growth. “We want to improve the health of the planet and its people while contributing to a fairer and more socially inclusive world,” says Adam Raeburn-James, Chief Technology Officer at Unilever. 

To bring this vision to life in an increasingly competitive consumer market, the company began laying the groundwork for a widescale digital transformation across the business. It sought faster speed to market, shortened innovation cycles for product launches, increased clarity and transparency around reducing carbon emissions, and new operational efficiencies, including resiliency and scalability. 

Prior to the cloud migration, Unilever modernized its foundation infrastructure, which included moving the network to internet-based technologies and simplifying the support models and application estate. This meant that the move to Azure would not only enable Unilever’s future but also provide a hard payback in terms of efficiency. 

Over the past two decades, Unilever has been gradually consolidating all of its IT environments across the world and optimizing its global datacenter footprint. Previously, application landscapes were fragmented, so any benefits from modernization efforts in one region would be isolated from the wider business. “Our OneTech strategy at Unilever is underpinned on our values around creating simpler and more innovative solutions for our employees as well as our ecosystem of partners, customers, suppliers, and consumers,” says Sam Kini, Chief Information Officer at Unilever. 

When Unilever was considering if it could maintain its on-premises datacenter strategy, it realized that the effort, cost, and value provided didn’t match how it wanted to provide services to the business. Says Phil Parr, Cloud Platform Services Director at Unilever, “We needed to become more flexible and responsive to our business needs.” 

This led Unilever to embark on a full-scale, accelerated cloud migration program, which included moving its critical SAP workstreams to SAP on Azure. “SAP ERP is the lifeline of Unilever’s business, and historically, we hosted our regional SAP systems out of our two United Kingdom datacenters,” says Sanjay Gandhi, Global IT Director – SAP Technology and Cloud Transformation at Unilever. 

The company’s goal was to rapidly exit its on-premises datacenter and migrate all of its SAP and non-SAP systems to the cloud in the shortest amount of time, bringing more agile ways of working in the cloud to the wider business. Gandhi elaborates, “Each of our four regional SAP systems is about 25 to 30 terabytes in size, and we had about 350 systems that had to be migrated in a record time of 18 months.” 

Unilever was initially drawn to Azure because of Microsoft’s 25 years as an SAP Global Technology Partner. Azure also presented Unilever with a highly secure and reliable cloud platform for the company to store and access data, manage applications, and develop new products to continue leading the market amid the migration. “The future roadmap for SAP and the size, scale, and complexity of SAP in our global datacenter really drove our decision to move to Azure,” says Parr. 

The company opted for a phased migration of its entire estate in close collaboration with both Microsoft and SAP, in addition to external partners, including Accenture, LTIMindtree, and HCLTech. This diverse support system ultimately resulted in Accenture leading the SAP core ERP to Azure migration and program delivery for Unilever, while Microsoft established governance and program management and helped streamline the migration of specialized workloads. “Our first system went live in August 2021, and between then and now, we’ve migrated 100 percent of our entire SAP estate to the cloud,” says Gandhi. In the process, Unilever modernized and transformed other environments, including its SAP Business Warehouse system, and simplified its overall architecture to ensure full cloud compatibility. Unilever’s full commitment to the cloud has allowed the company to since sell off its datacenters and remove the associated foundation technology, further enhancing the business case. 

One of the keys to success was collaboration; 150 people from across nine different organizations were involved in each migration. The teamwork and no-blame culture meant it was genuinely impossible to tell who was working for whom in the migrations. This allowed a “hard on issues, soft on people” review approach, which meant that each cutover became more and more reliable. “I’m really proud of the whole team here. Not only is the change of this scale and complexity industry leading, but the way we have executed it has exceeded everyone’s expectations in terms of reliability and speed,” says Raeburn-James.

A highly secure, scalable, and socially responsible SAP environment in the cloud

Now running on Azure, Unilever’s SAP estate encompasses approximately 2,400 SAP-certified Azure virtual machines (VMs), including 116 high-performing, high-memory M-series VMs, running a mix of Linux and Windows nodes, and more than 4 petabytes of Azure Premium SSD storage. Its Azure Disk Storage and Azure Files solution is highly secure, scalable, and most importantly, SAP approved, meeting the most stringent requirements for input/output throughput.

After the migration of the four regional core SAP ERP systems to Azure, Unilever experienced significant improvement on SAP performance. “Moving to Azure and experiencing better than on-premises performance was icing on the cake,” says Gandhi. “Our teams have been able to run processes much faster and release time back to the business with an overall 20 to 30 percent improvement for critical business processes.”

With Azure, Unilever can quickly scale its operations up and down depending on its needs, and it has access to analytics with Microsoft Power Platform products like Power BI alongside Azure machine learning services to extract insights from its data to help enhance customer service. Says Parr, “Being able to see all of our endpoints, make sure they’re compliant, and have that in a single dataset in Power BI is a definite advantage over a datacenter.” The combined capabilities support the company in accelerating digital transformation, adopting new technologies such as AI, and staying ahead of trends to meet consumer needs—all while maintaining its brand image through corporate social responsibility.

Near-zero downtime with failover protection for core ERP systems

Thanks to Azure, all four of Unilever’s core SAP ERP systems are now running on a highly resilient, fully interoperable, and high-performing platform that provides consistency across interconnected systems and can withstand potential failure with near-zero downtime. “One of our key requirements was the proximity of the regional disaster recovery zones, which had to be at least 300 miles apart,” says Gandhi. “We have split our regional workload across two different Azure regions to ensure our ability to ensure that business continuity and recovery time can be optimized.”

With high availability for SAP HANA on Azure, Unilever also has an elevated level of failover protection. “In case of any disruptions, we have near-zero recovery time because the failover would be either within the same zone or across multiple zones in the same regions, which helps ensure that services aren’t affected,” says Gandhi.

Thinking differently and building a better, cloud-native future

Unilever has been consolidating, optimizing, and architecting its SAP and non-SAP estate in conjunction with a fixed datacenter model for the past 20 years. With the support of Microsoft, Accenture, SAP, and others, it’s completed an entire cloud migration, including 200 applications, within an ambitious time frame of 18 months with no glitches or incidents. It’s now ready to build up its dream cloud environment to support growth for the next 20 years and beyond. “Our cloud migration is only the first step on our journey to full utilization of cloud in our IT strategy,” remarks Kini.

Parallel to its Azure migration, Unilever has developed a strategy to evolve into a product-centric cloud services function. The goal is to empower application teams and businesses to exploit the power of cloud technology, but in a safe, compliant, and economic manner. “We have designed an operating model that ensures that all the appropriate corporate guardrails are applied but also enables freedom for application and business teams to innovate and experiment quickly and safely,” says Parr. “One core component of the strategy is to provide a self-service offering, called the Innovation Hub, to enable application and business teams to self-serve with all the guardrails built in.”

Concludes Parr, “With Microsoft’s help, we’re educating and empowering other parts of the business to use the Microsoft Cloud in the best way, and with the flexibility of Azure, we’re really driving our ability to do more with less.”

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