Pilkington Brasil, part of NSG Group, drives self-sufficiency using AWS EBA

NSG makes glass products for technical, high-precision applications, as well as for the automotive and construction industries. With locations in Europe, North America, South America, and Asia, NSG relies on hosting environments to support a web of applications and data that its employees depend on. The company’s data center in Brazil was an essential regional business hub managed by the global information systems team. However, the company began to encounter infrastructure challenges, including limited storage and lack of scalability. Additionally, most of its data center server’s contract was approaching expiration, and the facility’s flood-prone location posed risks to stability.

Approximately 4 years prior, NSG had migrated its ecommerce platform to AWS after a competitive selection process, so using AWS for this migration as well was a natural choice. This time, however, the company wanted more than a packaged migration: It wanted a repeatable template that its teams could use to run future projects on their own. To achieve that, NSG turned to AWS EBA, a hands-on, agile, and immersive AWS program designed to build skills and accelerate cloud transformations.

Through the AWS EBA program, NSG’s global information systems team worked alongside AWS specialists to design the target environment and to practice migration cutovers. This personalized approach aligned with NSG’s do-it-yourself culture. “The AWS EBA program was specific to what we wanted from AWS,” says David Powell, global project manager at NSG. “Rather than it being a very generic training course, it helped answer our specific questions and gain confidence in using AWS.”

Over the course of 5 days, NSG’s teams joined daily 2–3-hour sessions that combined instruction with hands-on practice. They worked directly using AWS tools to set up backups, test disaster recovery, and run trial migrations. This practical approach gave administrators and engineers a repeatable framework that they could apply to the real migration, bolstering their skills and accelerating the project timeline.

To carry out the migration, NSG used AWS Application Migration Service, which simplifies, expedites, and reduces the cost of migrating and modernizing applications. NSG could then run its workloads on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which offers secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload. To have adaptable storage for backups, the company also used Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), an object storage service offering industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance. And to further safeguard its apps and data, the company used AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery, which minimizes downtime and data loss with fast, reliable recovery of on-premises and cloud-based applications.

After accumulating the requisite skill sets, Pilkington Brasil moved to action, building the company’s new cloud foundation on AWS in a step-by-step cutover to migrate more than 70 servers in 6 months. The migration from the Brazil data center was carried out with a 100 percent cutover rate without rollbacks, making it possible for NSG to fully decommission its on-premises servers. Fourteen employees across three regions were trained through the AWS EBA process, and NSG rated the program 4.8 out of 5 in the AWS post-engagement satisfaction survey. Operational stability improved, and outages and disruptions dropped noticeably.

With the Brazil migration complete, NSG now has a proven, repeatable framework that it can apply to migrations in other regions. “There’s a lot more productivity coming from that automation where we do something once in a command line, and then we can do it repeatedly without end-user interaction,” says Powell. “It can be scheduled and run on demand.”

Currently, the company is applying this framework in Japan with a data center migration and multi-region disaster recovery across Tokyo and Osaka. Supported by AWS networking and security services, NSG now has a more scalable, flexible, and stable foundation for its global operations.