Orica Limited, one of the worlds largest producers of commercial explosives and advanced blasting systems, has reportedly selected the U.S. IT giant, Cognizant to migrate its IT infrastructure to the cloud. Sources claim that the initiative will enable Orica to achieve greater efficiencies and business impact, further optimizing its capital investment and operating costs. Under the initiative, Cognizant will operate as Orica's technology advisor and a cloud-platform provider to develop a highly scalable, available and resilient IT platform on a pay-per-usage model, to enable mobile access to core enterprise systems, cite sources. Reportedly, Cognizant has designed and implemented a managed platform-as-a-service based on the SAP®S/4HANA ERP solution on Microsoft Azure. Moreover, as part of the implementation, Oricas eight core enterprise business processes are being transitioned to the new S/4HANA platform in 57 countries around the world. According to Gabriela Azzali, Orica's 4S Program Director, new technologies hold greater potential for the company to align with the needs of a fast-changing market by driving innovation and enabling new ways to work across every part of Orica. Cognizant has apparently leveraged its advanced cloud technology and platforms expertise to design and implement SAP®systems on HANA deployed on Microsoft's cloud computing platform, Azure. The company has also built business critical SAP®systems to kick-start the program on schedule, and executed automation processes in operations to control infrastructure costs, Azzali added further. Rajesh Balaji Ramachandran, Senior VP, Global Delivery Leader for Enterprise Application Services at Cognizant said that the ability to deploy, operate and manage modern, scalable and dynamic architectures in a quick and cost-effective manner on industry-leading cloud platforms is vital for enterprises today. The company is delighted to help Orica embrace the cloud and develop powerful monitoring, provisioning, and automation capabilities to increase operational flexibility and manage market volatility, Ramachandran added.