CNCITY Energy is first to adopt AWS Cloud in the industry

After reviewing both domestic and global cloud service providers, CNCITY Energy chose AWS for its stable infrastructure and scalability. To move the entire service environment for existing workloads (including SAP) to the cloud needed support from professional partners, so CNCITY Energy picked Woongjin Inc., a consulting partner of AWS with experience and know-how in operating SoH (Suite on HANA) directly. The fact that AWS was the first information security management system (ISMS)-certified cloud vendor in Korea was also a factor in CNCITY Energy’s choice.

“We decided to migrate our existing SAP infrastructure and web systems in late 2018, and started running services on AWS in February 2019,” said Chang-ho Seon, Team Leader, Management Innovation Support, CNCITY Energy.

“It usually takes more than six months to migrate and start operating services, but with active support from Woongjin, we were able to complete this in just five months,” he explained. CNCITY Energy is using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and storage as its infrastructure. The company currently uses HANA DB, SAP’s in-memory database, with an architecture that supports HA (High Availability) and DR (Disaster Recovery) on AWS. The Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) service was used to duplicate applications running on DBs.

When it was using a traditional on-premise approach, it was not possible for CNCITY Energy’s IT staff to monitor its systems on a 24-hour cycle. This made it hard to take action immediately in case a server went down. After moving to AWS, the environment itself, which is managed by a professional partner 24/7, is secure, reducing the burden of managing infrastructure operations. Another advantage of being on AWS is being able to keep up with the latest IT trends. Adopting new technologies such as container-based service transformation, data utilization and analysis were not possible on-premise servers. “The on-premise data center not only posed management issues but also physical risks. But now we just have a communication system that is connected to AWS, which has greatly reduced the management burden. 

After moving to AWS, team members have also been satisfied to have an environment where they can utilize infrastructure resources and new technologies at any time,” said Seon. According to him, scalability and reliability are the biggest advantages of AWS. “With on-premise servers, hardware specs couldn’t keep up with the pace of business growth, but AWS ensures hardware flexibility to support everything and provides a high level of infrastructure security,” he added.

In addition, what was previously available to security personnel is now visible on the AWS console using Amazon CloudWatch and AWS CloudTrail. “We used to design the system considering load peak times on on-premise solutions. Since adopting AWS, the burden of system management has been reduced, and new IT experiments have become possible. We expect to reduce costs both directly and indirectly by using cloud services without upfront purchases of equipment needed for the new experiments. Furthermore, we are very happy that our IT staff can improve their abilities in more specialized areas, and are pleased that we have the IT infrastructure to respond flexibly to the ever-changing energy market, given we are the first in the industry to adopt AWS,” said Seon.