Achieving a 33% compute cost reduction on AWS with Unicorne and Nova Steel

With its existing on-premises licensing and infrastructure agreements approaching expiration, Nova Steel faced a sharp increase in costs. Renewing those agreements would have locked the company into another expensive infrastructure cycle without addressing underlying challenges around resilience, security, and cost predictability. Nova Steel opted to use this inflection point to modernize its entire technology foundation.

The company needed to complete the migration within a defined timeline while minimizing disruption across its multiple facilities. It also wanted greater visibility and control over access to its environment, along with stronger security governance. The company engaged AWS Partner Unicorne, a Quebec-based AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner specializing in cloud migration and modernization, security, managed services, and AWS cost optimization. Unicorne was named the 2025 AWS Canada Rising Star Consulting Partner of the Year and holds the AWS Small and Medium Business Services Competency. These credentials gave Nova Steel confidence in the Partner’s ability to deliver a complex, time-sensitive migration.

Unicorne designed and delivered a secure, highly available AWS environment, migrating Nova Steel away from its legacy on-premises infrastructure before the costly licensing and infrastructure-renewal deadline. The migration encompassed compute workloads running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)—which provides secure and resizable compute capacity—and containerized applications supported by Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) so that Nova Steel can build, run, and scale production-ready Kubernetes applications. Unicorne addressed storage requirements by using Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), object storage built to retrieve any amount of data from anywhere, and Amazon S3 Glacier storage classes for longer-term archiving.

Unicorne implemented a security-by-design approach incorporating AWS Security Hub, which prioritizes critical security issues, to centralize security findings and improve visibility. The Partner also implemented AWS Config to assess, audit, and evaluate configurations of resources, AWS WAF to protect applications from common exploits, and AWS Network Firewall to deploy advanced network firewall security across its virtual private clouds. This layered approach gave Nova Steel the visibility and control that it had been seeking over access to its environment and infrastructure.

The new environment uses Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) to define and launch AWS resources in a logically isolated virtual network, with Elastic Load Balancing distributing network traffic to improve application scalability and resilience. Nova Steel uses Amazon CloudWatch to observe and optimize workloads, and AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) to create and control keys. To address cost predictability, Unicorne implemented AWS Savings Plans to save with a flexible pricing model across eligible compute workloads, establishing a predictable spending model with significant savings compared with On-Demand pricing.

Nova Steel achieved a 33 percent reduction in compute costs compared with On-Demand pricing, translating to approximately $4,500 in monthly compute savings and approximately $52,000 in annual cost savings. A 98 percent Savings Plans coverage gives Nova Steel confidence that costs remain consistent as the company continues to expand its footprint using AWS.

Nova Steel now operates with stronger security governance and greater visibility into its AWS environment, with centralized oversight of security findings, configuration compliance, and access controls that were difficult to achieve under the previous on-premises model. The company has experienced reduced downtime and improved service-level agreement performance, strengthening the reliability of technology services that support manufacturing operations across 22 plants. “Migrating to AWS gave Nova Steel more than a replacement for our on-premises infrastructure. Using AWS, we now have an environment that is more resilient, easier to manage, and provides much greater visibility into security and access,” says Sylvain Prevost, vice president of digital and technology and chief information officer at Nova Steel.

Unicorne is a Quebec-based AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner in cloud migration, security, and cost optimization.