KOMCA reinforces reliability and security of its service with AWS

Established in 1964, Korea Music Copyright Association (KOMCA) is the largest copyright trust organization in Korea. It contributes to the improvement of music culture by protecting the rights and interests of copyright holders under the Copyright Act and facilitates the use of music for users. As of 2020, KOMCA manages the copyrights of approximately 34,000 lyricists and composers as well as roughly 3.9 million songs, including foreign songs.

Currently, KOMCA has approximately 12 billion lines of log data, which is equivalent to 30,000 gigabytes.

As the demand for global services related to music copyright grows, so does the amount of logs KOMCA manages. KOMCA quickly became aware of two setbacks: they needed a scalable way to manage their data, and their usual equipment had surpassed its recommended usage period. These two realizations led the team to turn to Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Cho Seong-nam, a team leader at KOMCA, explained, “By migrating to the AWS Cloud, we were seeking to manage vast amounts of data safely and efficiently and overcome the limitations of aging equipment and problems of storage expansion. In response to new IT trends, we concluded that the cloud could provide a high level of security and scalability that is right for us.”

With support from AWS Partner Network (APN) Partner Bespin Global, KOMCA implemented cloud-based solutions that best fit their network configurations and current legacy systems while simultaneously establishing an optimization plan. “With the help of AWS and an APN Partner, we successfully migrated the key IT system including servers, storage, and groupware to AWS in just one month,” says Cho.

Cho said KOMCA's first goal is to keep members’ data safe and support the system reliably. According to him, KOMCA chose AWS to upgrade its music copyrights management system because it has extensive customer references, with the highest performance and security levels.

KOMCA uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) to meet its security and scalability needs. KOMCA also uses Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) Network Address Translation (NAT) Gateway to block unauthorized access. Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) are used by KOMCA to manage database services for simple configuration and to operate relational databases.

Cho added “After migrating to AWS, service response time is 10 times faster. We can also check the infrastructure status from the AWS Console Dashboard at a glance, so we can easily manage the servers. As the speed has become faster, members visiting our homepage and employees using the trust management programs are much happier. We are able to manage the service flexibly—we can freely scale up or down with just a few clicks within our budget,” says Cho.