コスト感、信頼性、セキュリティ、実績などを考慮し、AWS を選びました。
基幹系システムの稼働を含め AWS の実績には魅力的なものがありました。
Marubeni, with goals to strengthen its group of subsidiaries, decided to migrate its IT infrastructure, the foundation of its business processes, from an on-premise environment to AWS. More than 250 server instances were running in AWS at the end of 2017, after the migration project started in 2013. The move to AWS has relieved the Information Planning Division from responding to server replacement and version updates and has enabled them to focus on planning for the business’ future expansion. In addition, it has realized cheaper and more efficient BCP (Business Continuity Plan) benefits.
The Marubeni Corporation, a general trading company, was founded in 1858, and has 133 offices in 58 countries and regions worldwide. The Marubeni Group, which oversees its main corporate units, has the vision of “further strengthening the financial foundation” and “evolving the business strategies,” formulating the mid-term management plan “Global Challenge 2018” for 2020.
Marubeni needed an IT infrastructure that supports efficient business activities to strengthen the group’s management capability. As a result, it was necessary to evolve the IT infrastructure for the entire group instead of serving a single corporate unit. For example, building a secure environment where information can be gathered and analyzed by the overall group has become a challenge.
An additional issue with a traditional IT infrastructure environment was the difficulty in planning for appropriate sizing, predicting future IT needs, and updating the hardware generated every five years.
There were also costs related to Business Continuity Planning (BCP) requirements. Disaster recovery operations hosted at two mutually isolated locations required significant investment in equipment and hardware. A requirement for a cost-efficient BCP, without compromising safety and reliability, was high on its IT needs.
Marubeni began to evaluate how a new IT infrastructure could address its challenges, as its on-premise environment was due for renewal. They decided to migrate to the cloud, which provides a more flexible and cost-effective IT infrastructure inexpensively. Amazon Web Services (AWS) was chosen from among several cloud services providers.
“We selected AWS based on cost, reliability, security, and its proven track record for the core system,” said Mr. Junichi Kato, acting Division Manager of the Information Planning Division, Marubeni Corporation.
As AWS has the biggest global footprint, Marubeni believed that AWS could provide the infrastructure it required. It decided that AWS was more secure compared to an in-house data center, as AWS has an extensive cloud infrastructure with comprehensive compliance controls. “We believe that AWS, the leading cloud infrastructure, is the platform of choice. It continuously invests in security, compliance, and develops new service where we can leverage the benefits, “ said Mr. Kato.
Serverworks Co., Ltd., an AWS Premium Consulting Partner with Migration competency, supported Marubeni with the migration to AWS. The partner has a strong cloud practice track record and experience in migrating on-premises infrastructures to AWS . “There was also training provided on the AWS management console for Marubeni Group IT employees in the proposal,” explained Mr. Yuya Ashikawa, from the General Affairs Planning Section, Information Planning Division, Marubeni Corporation. The training enabled skills transfer and for AWS to be leveraged more effectively and efficiently.
Marubeni migrated about 30 servers due for renewal to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance from its on-premise environment in the first phase in 2013 – the physical servers were first virtualized using VMware temporarily before migrating the virtual environment to the cloud using VM Import. In addition, it migrated part of the database to Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS). In addition, Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) were used for storage, and Amazon CloudWatch was used for monitoring.
Serverworks, was able to support and respond to the complex configuration with speed and professionalism having already completed AWS migration for many enterprise customers. In addition, the AWS skill transfer enabled the Marubeni IT Solutions team to provide operational support to the Group’s IT. As a result, after the first phase, Marubeni was able to carry out the migration without needing additional Serverworks support. It is currently evaluating new proposals to leverage other AWS native services, with counsel from Serverworks.
Since it started executing on its plan, it has migrated 220 instances supporting the core system to AWS, and are in the process of migrating another 300+ more servers. “We plan to transfer the core SAP ERP system by 2020. While some office computers and UNIX-based systems will remain on premises, by migrating almost all to AWS, we can significantly reduce the in-house data center footprint, “ said Mr. Kato.
Moving to AWS has significantly reduced procurement time. For example, it takes about two days to procure and configure servers compared to three months previously. For urgent IT needs, this process can be completed on the same day.
Although the difference in cost for its current AWS consumption is not as significant compared to traditional hardware, the decrease in the time and effort to operate, replace hardware, daily maintenance, and a reduced lead time for resource procurement has significantly improved its total cost of ownership. It also leverages the Singapore region for disaster recovery purposes, in addition to the Tokyo region.
Marubeni plans to further optimize costs, such as turning off the server instance consumption when unutilized at night.
“The evaluation that AWS is a global infrastructure with minimum failures and unmatched reliability has been established internally. We would like to utilize the other services such as Amazon Redshift to leverage AWS more efficiently in the future. The benefit of being on AWS is that it makes it easy and cheap for users to experiment with new services,” said Mr. Asikawa.
Marubeni’s Information Planning Division employees can now shift to their focus to new innovations such as the future Group IT environment road map instead of worrying about replacing servers and updating software
Mr. Junichi Kato
Mr. Yuya Ashikawa
APN CONSULTING PARTNERS
Serverworks Co., Ltd.
It is a cloud integrator with more than 610 companies and 3,900 projects of AWS introduction track records, that provides the integration business and services specialized in AWS. An APN Premium Consulting Partner since 2013. It has transfer competency. (As of January 2018)
For more information about how AWS cloud can help enterprise companies, please refer to the AWS in the Enterprise detail page.