As the largest dairy manufacturer in Egypt, Juhayna Industries needed to transform its IT infrastructure to remain an industry leader and to reduce costs. Moving to the cloud, with its on-demand capacity and consumption-based pricing, was an attractive option. Mohamed Saied, IT Director at Juhayna Food Industries, and his team compared various cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services (AWS).



Juhayna Food Industries is the largest dairy manufacturer in Egypt and produces, processes, and packages juices and cooking products. Founded in 1983, Juhayna now operates four production sites, a vast network of warehouses and distribution centers serving more than 136,000 outlets, and a dairy farm, home to 7,000 milking cows. It also employs 4,000 people.

Juhayna Saves $200,000 a Year by Moving SAP to the Cloud

Moving to AWS with FORTE CLOUD was a great decision for the future of Juhayna”.

Mohamed Saied
IT director, Juhayna Food Industries

Juhayna Seeks Freedom in the Cloud

After Juhayna moving SAP to the cloud AWS, Juhayna began working with APN Advanced Consulting Partner FORTE CLOUD. The original plan was to move only non-production workloads to the cloud, but FORTE CLOUD put forward such a compelling business case for a total migration, that Juhayna decided to migrate everything. Saied says, “FORTE CLOUD’s expertise and comprehensive vision for the new cloud environment gave us confidence to increase the scope of our project and have FORTE CLOUD’s experts plan and lead it.”

“Moving our SAP HANA environment to AWS was hands-down the best choice for us,” adds Saied. “Over a nine-year lifespan, the total cost of ownership was more than $200,000 a year less than on premises—a saving of around 40 percent. On top of this, we have advantages over other options, like built-in resiliency, limitless scalability, high availability, and simpler manageability.”

A Three-Month Journey to the Cloud

Migrating Juhayna’s core business processes to AWS and Juhayna moving SAP to the cloud took just three months. Says Saied, “We were impressed by the ability of FORTE CLOUD to manage the project and design an architecture that could meet our current and future needs. The FORTE CLOUD team understood our complex business model and added value at every stage—such as when it saved us money by right-sizing some of our lesser-used resources.”

The AWS environment is based on Amazon EC2 instances running SAP HANA. “AWS has a wealth of specialized SAP HANA instances—in fact, it was our contacts at SAP who suggested to explore AWS offerings,” says Saied. “Plus, the scripts and interfaces that FORTE CLOUD provides mean my IT team spends less time on routine management and more on projects with our newly formed digital transformation department.”

A Highly Available Solution

It is vital for Juhayna that its database and applications are always available for its production and sales systems. Considering this, the FORTE CLOUD and AWS teams recommended a high availability methodology in line with Juhayna’s recovery-point and recovery-time objectives. FORTE CLOUD created two identical databases and three application servers using SAP HANA system replication, which creates copies of the data for both database instances to ensure a quick failover from primary to secondary in case of an outage.

Benefits Extend Far Beyond the Data Center

Because SAP is the beating heart of Juhayna, employees across the company saw the benefits of the AWS Cloud almost immediately. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Saied could respond quickly to the business request for remote working. “Our old gateways and firewalls would never have handled 1,000-plus remote connections, but with AWS, that wasn’t anissue. When I was asked to enable working from home, we got it done in three days,” says Saied.

Performance, too, has improved, thanks in no small part to the power of SAP HANA and the underlying compute and memory resources. “Tasks that used to take five days now take one. And tasks that used to take a day now take 20 minutes,” says Saied.

This performance boost has real-world consequences. For example, Juhayna’s field sales force can now sync their remote devices to their SAP databases more quickly. This means they spend less time on each delivery waiting for data to load and can make more deliveries in a day.

“Moving to AWS with FORTE CLOUD was a great decision for the future of Juhayna,” says Saied. “We’re choosing to disrupt ourselves before disruption comes from outside.”


Benefits of AWS

    • Cost reduction
    • Elasticity
    • High availability
    • Improved performance, agility and speed
    • Reduce time to market
    • Security and Compliance

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Businesses of all sizes across all industries are transforming their organizations each day using AWS and FORTE CLOUD. Contact our professionals and start your AWS Cloud journey today.