Sonepar– Cloud Services over Private Links

ERP-Migration to the Cloud

Sonepar Switzerland is part of the global Sonepar Group (45,000 employees, USD 3.3 billion in sales), which is active in the electrical wholesale business. Sonepar Switzerland offers a wide range of products and services for the electrical industry, including electrical installation materials, lighting, cables, security technology and automation solutions. The company focuses on commercial customers such as electricians, installers, industrial companies and other electrical specialists.

Sonepar Switzerland’s services also include technical advice, training, logistics solutions and digital services such as e-commerce platforms that make it easier to purchase and manage electrical materials. The project was triggered by the migration of the existing ERP solution to the cloud. To support the new ERP solution in the cloud, the on-premise BI solution also had to be replaced by Power BI in the cloud.

The collaboration with TwinCap First AG is extremely productive. The cloud expertise of its employees, particularly in the area of private link connections and private DNS, contributes significantly to the success of our Azure projects.

The ability to create and deploy infrastructure as code provides a solid foundation for successfully managing demanding Azure environments. The solution developed by TwinCap First AG impresses with its sustainable structure and perfect scalability, which optimally supports our future growth.

Simon Andres IT Project Manager

The challenge: multiple identical environments and no public access to cloud resources

The implementation of the new ERP system Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations (FO), as well as the use of Power BI for Business Intelligence (BI) services in the cloud, presented particular challenges. In particular, with regard to network security requirements and the management of multiple identical environments (development, UAT and production). Additional Azure cloud services such as Databricks, Data Factories, KeyVaults and Self-Hosted Runtimes for Azure DevOps and Data Gateways for Power BI are used in each environment.

All these resources were to be created in three environments with disabled public access, configured in the same way. The cloud adoption and well-architected framework standards defined by the Sonepar Group also had to be adhered to.

The solution: Infrastructure-as-Code and Private Network Links

One of the advantages of a cloud solution such as Microsoft Azure is that resources can be accessed from anywhere via the internet.

To meet the security requirements of the Sonepar Group, all Azure resources must be accessible only via private links. This means that all resources are located in the cloud, but for security reasons they can only be accessed via the internal virtual network cards of the private links and via a VPN solution to an Azure data center.

Terraform is used to create and manage multiple identical environments (development, UAT and production). The challenge was to ensure that all three environments are configured identically and that changes in one environment can be easily transferred to the others. This required careful management of Terraform scripts, as well as continuous monitoring and updating to ensure the consistency and integrity of the environments.