Keltron Delivers a Secure Hybrid Cloud Solution to Government Agencies using AWS Outposts

Kerala State Electronics Development Corporation Limited (Keltron), founded in 1973, was initially guided by a simple mission: to manufacture high-quality black-and-white televisions. Fifty years later, the company has grown to provide a wide range of products and technologies to state and local government departments across Kerala, India. Keltron offers a diverse portfolio of products including underwater communication systems, traffic management systems, and high-power systems for Indian nuclear power plants.

The Keltron Information Technology Group (ITBG) drives much of the company’s growth, providing design, cloud, networking, and storage solutions and services. Given the importance of flexibility in managing biannual seasonal workloads like streaming election results online, many of Keltron’s customers prefer cloud-based solutions. “With cloud-based solutions, our customers can avoid unnecessary expenses and gain better control over resource allocation,” says a project manager at Keltron.

According to the project manager, data security is critical. Each state has strict data residency rules, so even though many agencies want to move to the cloud, they still need to make sure the data resides in their specific country or territory. This calls for scalable on-premises solutions with cloud back-end services.

Keltron engaged StarOne IT Solutions, an AWS Partner, to build a hybrid cloud solution to meet customer demand for both data residency and elasticity. Kerala-based StarOne is an IT services company that provides specialized IT solutions for global customers. Keltron was already running its election streaming platform on AWS, and had previously worked with StarOne IT. “We knew we could set up a solution quickly based on our previous experience with AWS, and we trusted StarOne to assist us,” says the project manager. The hybrid solution started with a combination of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) C5 and Amazon EC2 M5 instances to meet customers’ general purpose compute requirements.

StarOne then proposed a solution based on AWS Outposts, a family of managed solutions that deliver AWS services to virtually any on-premises location. StarOne worked with Keltron and its customers to understand requirements and assess which workloads could run on AWS Outposts. It then provided design, architecture, and implementation assistance, and post-implementation support. With AWS Outposts, Keltron has a single, centralized console to manage local data centers and cloud-based workloads, and it can now offer managed services for government agencies and departments across India.