EOS Group Migrates Data to Amazon Redshift, Reducing Infrastructure Costs by 50%

EOS Group is a technology-driven financial services company headquartered in Germany and operates in more than 20 countries worldwide. EOS Group’s IT division, EOS Technology Solutions, provides critical services, such as data warehouse solutions and IT-infrastructure support, to other members of its parent company, Otto Group.

Data has become a cornerstone for strategic decision-making at EOS Group, driving insights that empower the organization to optimize operations and identify growth opportunities. Driven by 15 percent yearly growth of data volume, EOS Group has been required to move away from on-premises solutions to achieve better performance and scalability. Additionally, EOS Group operates in the highly regulated financial services sector, handling personally identifiable information (PII) that is subject to strict data protection laws. EOS Group faced the challenge of managing stringent security and compliance requirements while optimizing costs within its environment.

By removing the need for on-premises infrastructure, EOS Group could improve performance and reduce costs. The company decided to migrate its data to Amazon Redshift, which helps businesses power data-driven decisions with the best price-performance cloud data warehouse. “Our goal is to harness the power of data to drive innovation and unlock new growth opportunities,” says Daniel Wendt, team lead and product owner of business data at EOS Group . “By migrating to Amazon Redshift, we aimed to overcome the limitations of our on-premises data warehouse and gain the agility and scalability needed to stay ahead in the dynamic financial services industry.”

In terms of migration planning and implementation, EOS Group followed the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (AWS MAP), which is a comprehensive and proven cloud migration program. AWS MAP consists of three phases: Assess, Mobilize, and Migrate and Modernize. During the Assess phase, EOS Group underwent a comprehensive assessment to understand the migration scope, potential challenges, and technical requirements. During the Mobilize phase, EOS Group worked alongside b.telligent, an AWS Partner, to jointly create an architectural blueprint as groundwork for the migration. Once migration preparations were complete, EOS Group began the Migrate and Modernize phase by using AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS), which is used to securely migrate databases with minimal downtime, to seamlessly migrate its data to a centralized data lake on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), which is an object storage built to retrieve virtually any amount of data from anywhere. From Amazon S3, the data was loaded into Amazon Redshift with minimal downtime and zero data loss.

Amazon Redshift provided EOS Group greater flexibility, scalability, and cost-efficiency. Additionally, after a transition and evaluation period, the data masking approach that EOS Group had used previously was replaced by dynamic data masking in Amazon Redshift. Using this feature, EOS Group was able to automatically mask sensitive data based on user permissions, verifying that only authorized personnel could view PII. This helped EOS Group to securely process and store sensitive data in the cloud while meeting the stringent data protection requirements of the financial services sector.

The migration to Amazon Redshift helped EOS Group to reach a new performance level when it comes to load peaks, and the concurrency scaling and necessary cluster capacity features of Amazon Redshift are automatically included—features that would not have been possible with EOS Group’s legacy on-premises setup. By removing the need for on-premises infrastructure, EOS Group achieved a 50 percent reduction in infrastructure costs, with the clear prospect of achieving further cost reductions from the ongoing performance improvements and optimizations.

Looking ahead, EOS Group plans to use the data-sharing feature of Amazon Redshift to make commonly used data more accessible across the organization. This improved access to high-quality data will enhance decision-making and provide a competitive advantage for new portfolio purchases. Additionally, this opens up the possibility to explore advanced analytics and machine learning capabilities by deploying models directly on Amazon Redshift, further driving innovation and maintaining a competitive edge in the financial services industry.

“AWS and the adoption of Amazon Redshift have been instrumental in driving innovation, optimizing our operations, and positioning EOS Group for long-term success in the dynamic financial services industry,” says Patrick Witte, head of cloud services at EOS Group. “We’ve not only addressed our performance and scalability challenges but also achieved significant cost savings while meeting stringent security and compliance requirements. With Amazon Redshift as the foundation of our data and analytics platform, we’re excited to unlock new opportunities and continue delivering data-driven insights that empower our business.”