Cloud Migration: Why Zalora, DBS Bank, and Land Transport Authority Chose AWS

Published on 12 February 2018

There is a general agreement among IT professionals across all industries that the cloud is the future of IT. In fact, according to a recent Intel Security report, more than 93% of the 1400+ IT professionals it surveyed revealed that their organization was already using one or more cloud services. This growing trend is true for all industries, irrespective of their geographies.

6 Key Reasons to Choose AWS As Your Cloud Platform

Thousands of businesses across 190+ countries have already chosen cloud solutions like Amazon Web Services (AWS) to migrate their in-house IT infrastructure to the cloud, and that number is growing fast as we speak. There are many compelling reasons why AWS is the choice of so many businesses as against the traditional, physical IT infrastructure they had been dependent on for so long. Here are the most important ones:

1. Ease of use

AWS is a cloud solution from one of the world’s biggest brands – Amazon. Naturally, the attention to detail is the highlight of this service. The service offers a whole range of web services APIs, features, easy-to-follow steps, and extensive documentation to help businesses migrate their apps and services onto the platform.

2. Cost-effectiveness

Imagine having access to unlimited space, ability to set up new servers and remove them at will, scale up or scale down your IT infrastructure, provide unlimited bandwidth, and more, all the while paying for only what you use. There are no upfront investments or costs involved. Unlike popular perception, AWS is not a solution that is designed for only the big corporations, it is a solution for everyone from startups to large enterprises.

3. Elasticity and scalability

Whether your business experiences seasonal demand fluctuations or requires a rapidly expanding IT infrastructure to assist you in your fast growth, AWS can handle it all.

4. Experience

Businesses across the globe, located in over 190+ countries already use AWS services. It is one of the most rigorously tested and highly reliable cloud services platforms in the world.

5. Flexibility

The highly flexible AWS platform allows businesses to migrate to the cloud and still retain their familiar databases, architectures, OS, programming languages, and other services. So, businesses enjoy improved productivity on enhanced infrastructure that is remarkably familiar.

6. Security

The highly secure infrastructure of AWS boasts of multiple geography-based redundancies for reliability and uptime even in the face of natural or manmade disasters, high emphasis on security, configurable firewall rules for businesses, and much more.

With so much on offer, AWS has become the natural choice for businesses that are contemplating cloud migration. With that, these benefits are translating from just a theory to tangible advantages for organizations. Perhaps, a look into the real use cases might shed more light onto this.

Case Study #1: Zalora Case

Zalora is one of the biggest online fashion retailers in the Asia Pacific region. When they started in 2012, their online IT infrastructure was hosted in a data center. However, after its phenomenal growth in a short period of time, Zalora soon realized that it was unable to scale up its hosted infrastructure fast, and when they did, much of the infrastructure would remain unused throughout the year, except during the peak demand period. Needless to say, their hosted infrastructure was extremely cost-ineffective. This is when they began to look into cloud options and they came across Amazon’s AWS services.

Initially, Zalora had reservations about the availability of the AWS platform. As a business, they didn’t wish to put all their eggs in the same basket. Therefore, they migrated a fraction of their online infrastructure to AWS and observed its reliability. Once satisfied, they completely migrated a bulk of their online infrastructure to AWS. They even launched their Taiwan website on the AWS platform from the get go. They soon saw a rapid reduction in dependency on technical expertise. Among their 1,500 employees, only 100 are engineers. They are able to scale up, create new instances, add new features and do much more with ease in a fraction of the time it took them before. They are now able to cater to 30+ million online users, without facing any hiccups during peak demand periods.

Case Study #2: DBS Bank

DBS Bank is a multinational bank headquartered in Singapore. It is the largest bank in South-East Asia and has been on the forefront in offering technology based innovative services to its customers. The bank’s intense focus on digital solutions has won it the Euromoney award for the World’s Best Digital Bank. Euromoney also named DBS Bank the Asia’s Best Bank for 2016. As it became a pioneer in embracing next-gen technologies, DBS Bank realized that the lion’s share of competition it will face in the future will not come from traditional banks, but from fintech startups that are trying to disrupt the world of finance and technology. The bank saw the solution to this new challenge in cloud solutions, specifically the Amazon’s AWS.

DBS Bank decided to leverage the massive capabilities and partner network of AWS. The bank is already moving its entire public web assets to AWS. They support 50% of all the customer traffic and internet banking workloads for the bank. In addition, the bank is experimenting with ways to take advantage of Machine Learning and Data Analytics capabilities of AWS to create a competitive advantage for themselves.

Case Study #3: Land Transport Authority of Singapore

The Land Transport Authority of Singapore is the government agency responsible for the development, policies, and enforcement of all land transport in Singapore. With more than 2.2 million users a day, the LTA shoulders massive responsibility. The challenges before them are immense – a growing user base, faster disaster recovery management requirement, financial considerations, and the likes. In addition to managing the services, they need to constantly scale up their operations to meet a growing demand and user base. The cloud became the next frontier for LTA.

After analyzing two solutions, the LTA decided to go ahead with AWS as its cloud partner. LTA noticed that the roll out of AWS was significantly faster, and the implementation costs were 60% less when compared to the in-house IT infrastructure. This was significant. Any scale ups of traditional IT infrastructure would take months of time through the tendering process, since it is a government organization. However, with AWS, incrementing the infrastructure took them just 7 minutes. What’s more, AWS complies with all the ICT Security Compliance Policies set up by the government. So, AWS was a natural choice for them.

Conclusion

Amazon’s AWS platform is a constantly evolving and innovating platform that is releasing new features, capabilities, and technologies to support the cutting-edge needs of all modern businesses. In fact, Gartner has named AWS as the Leader in the cloud-as-a-service domain.

If you wish to leverage the multitude of advantages offered by AWS and improve your organization’s efficiency and effectiveness, then contact us to discuss your requirements and take the leap into the future today.

*AsiaPac is recognized as an AWS consulting and government partner and have been awarded the Amazon Web Services ASEAN Consulting Partner of the Year 2017. Click here for more details.

Tags: Amazon, Amazon Web Services, AWS, Cloud, DBS Bank, IT Infrastructure, Land Transport Authority, LTA, Zalora,

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