Metrodata Helps PT Penjaminan Infrastruktur Indonesia Cut Costs, Improve Security Using AWS

PII’s technical team was increasingly finding itself maintaining infrastructure and unable to spend enough time innovating and improving the core business applications. “Our on-premises system was old, slow, and unreliable,” says Yasril Sjaf, vice president of IT at PII. “PII is not an IT company so we don’t want to manage a large team of IT experts. It’s vital that our staff can focus on the core business and we make the most efficient use of both our technical and human resources.”

PII was committed to modernizing its infrastructure for the future by migrating away from an on-premises data center to the cloud. It evaluated several cloud providers and chose AWS because of its diverse range of managed services, and strong presence in the Asia-Pacific region. Lacking the in-house technical resources needed to execute the project, PII turned to Metrodata. Because the migration would require handling business-critical systems and improving security, it was important to use a trusted and reputable technical partner. “We have a history working with PII and this project is the first step of a long-term transformation,” says Hariyo Nusantoro, division head manager at Metrodata. “We helped PII choose the most appropriate AWS services to make its infrastructure more reliable, secure, and efficient.”

Metrodata completed the migration of PII’s production environment from the on-premises environment to AWS in 4 months. PII’s databases were migrated to Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), an easy-to-manage relational database optimized for cost. PII had several asset management applications that were replatformed, with compute power provided by Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload, and object storage using Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).

To minimize latency, PII used Amazon CloudFront, a content delivery network (CDN) service built for high performance, security, and developer convenience. AWS CloudTrail is used to improve the tracking of users and APIs and AWS WAF protects against common web exploits. Amazon GuardDuty provides intelligent threat detection and reporting.

One year since the migration, Sjaf says the benefits are impressive and quantifiable. Infrastructure costs have fallen by about a third while system performance, reliability, and security have all improved. “Comparing the costs to our previous on-premises infrastructure, using AWS is 30 percent cheaper,” says Sjaf. “But more importantly, our users have experienced a 70 percent performance boost—everyone is happy because the new system is very fast and there are no bottlenecks.”

Downtime has also been slashed. Sjaf notes that the on-premises infrastructure was too often inaccessible. “Before migrating to AWS, we were experiencing some downtime almost every day—our uptime was at maximum 95 percent,” he says. “Now I can tell the board that our uptime is above 99.9%, which is a significant improvement.”

The new infrastructure was designed to comply with AWS security best practices, which has reduced the number of attacks on PII’s applications. “Since we adopted AWS security guidelines, the number of attempted attacks on our infrastructure has fallen by 90 percent,” says Sjaf. “We’re better protected now and Amazon GuardDuty is excellent at monitoring and reporting any potential threats. Now we have a secure, modern infrastructure that will support PII moving forward.”

Sjaf says that PII’s relationship with Metrodata is closer than ever, and the companies are already discussing how to best continue the evolution of PII’s infrastructure. The next steps include upgrading its disaster recovery systems and investigating how data could be used to provide business insights. “First we’re going to prepare a data lake to get some insights and then start with simple AI but I think we will do generative AI in the future,” says Sjaf. 

In the longer term, Metrodata will help PII use more AWS services to further increase efficiency and productivity. “AWS provides technology services that fulfill specific business needs,” says Sjaf. “Now, instead of our technical staff having to maintain the infrastructure they can focus on innovation and improving our asset applications.”