Use of AWS Professional Services increases the efficiency of the Sesc Digital cloud

Even with all the benefits brought by the cloud - scalability, high availability, savings, agility and innovation - the executive recognizes that his team faced the challenge of understanding how to use the cloud in a structured way in order to create, operate, manage and maintain an ideal environment. “At a certain point, we discovered that we would not be able to move to a new cloud-based operating model with the knowledge we had, because we were a very lean team, where not everyone is an IT professional,” he explains.

Hence the decision to hire AWS Professional Services, to act as consultants, solving more complex technical issues within the projects to be executed. “We also had the objective of empowering our team to become independent by transferring knowledge and skills throughout the engagement,” he recalls.

After hiring AWS Professional Services, the two teams began working together to consolidate a CCoE (Cloud Center of Excellence) focused on increasing the efficiency of the environment’s use by modernizing and automating the infrastructure and the operation itself. This would be done by implementing automated processes to provision and manage cloud resources, reducing the need for manual intervention and improving efficiency. And all of this is documented on the internal CCoE wiki, as illustrated below.

“For example, with our implementation of the AFT (Account Factory for Terraform), we improved the multi-account approach, simplifying standardization and governance, in addition to reducing the entire environment’s delivery time, due to the number of steps,” Rocha explains. This specific implementation made it possible to automate manual steps and add intelligence, improving governance and time to market. With a structure that is dynamic and secure by design, the AFT allows the delivery of new AWS accounts that already include the adopted standards and previously created resources, which, in the case of Sesc Digital, reduced the provisioning time of environments from weeks to just 2 hours.

Another focus of the work was on improving the security posture, obtained with the implementation of an automated security response solution and the creation of the Security Dashboard (CISO Dashboard), which helped monitor the resolution of critical issues in the main products. There were also improvements in data protection obtained by implementing an encryption model in several products, such as the Sesc Digital distance training platform. In the area of access management, the AWS IAM Identity Center was implemented, allowing for more efficient user and access management with password policy, granular permission, and password expiration.

Rocha points out that one of the evolutions in the operation was the construction of operational dashboards. It was based on an architecture (see below) created to provide better financial management for the environment, bringing visibility, transparency, and greater control over cloud spending. “Today we have dashboards and alerts that help us quickly identify an unexpected expense or when the planned budget is close to being reached,” he explains.

“AWS technology combined with the support of the AWS Professional Services team helped Sesc Digital accelerate cloud adoption and digital transformation. With this, we are currently able to launch several products and services quickly, safely and supported by efficient operation through the CCoE. That's exactly what we expected when we started our cloud journey,” he celebrates.

As a result of the work to implement the CCoE, Rocha highlights the increase in knowledge and maturity among the Sesc Digital team in relation to cloud resources. Today, 60% of the professionals on the Sesc team who work in management and operation are AWS certified. More than that, contact with the AWS Professional Services team allowed these professionals to gain autonomy, directly reflecting on the improvement of the team's knowledge with a focus on security and financial management.

“In terms of security, with continuous collaborative work between the AWS Professional Services team and the Sesc team, in the first month alone, we have already reduced 60% of the hundreds of critically serious items identified,” he reveals. In addition, the team gained predictability in cost management, an element currently defined and adjusted according to the consumption history and the future projection of new demands. All defined amounts are aligned with the financial area of Sesc and all budgets are made per service and for each one, with an alert when the amounts reach 80% of what is estimated for the month.

“Because we work with cultural events, shows and presentations, we have a large amount of images stored. In this sense, we carried out an optimization, reducing monthly costs by 82%,” he says. With the knowledge acquired with the AWS Professional Services team, the Sesc Digital team carried out an analysis using Amazon S3 Storage Lens and identified the buckets with the highest expenses and this reduction, it generated a 69% savings in Amazon S3 costs, one of the services with the highest value in the monthly bill with AWS. In addition, Amazon QuickSight users were sanitized, generating a reduction of 39%.

“All these reductions represent how important the knowledge transfer carried out by the AWS Professional Services team was, and how it generated an internal culture at Sesc to always worry about cloud costs in our daily lives to make the best use of AWS services,” says Rocha, also citing the exchange of processors from some instances to AWS Graviton, which resulted in cost reductions of more than 50%, combined with a performance gain compared to the previous model.

Rocha also points out that the CCoE was fundamental to scaling new strategic initiatives. For example, the launch of the "Relicário" project, which rescues historic and unreleased recordings by big names in Brazilian music that were performed at the Sesc units in São Paulo in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, making them accessible and available to everyone through its Sesc Digital music platform. Other future initiatives include the evolution of the music platform; the release of new albums; the creation of a video platform; and partnerships with Amazon Music, Alexa, Prime Video, and Audible.