Achieving Operational Excellence Using AWS Managed Services with Village Roadshow

Village offers its customers seamless cinema and theme park experiences with applications featuring ticket purchasing, a digital food-and-beverage ordering service, a contact center, and payment portals in the cloud. Village’s previous solution led to day-to-day operational challenges, cost overhead, and compliance and security issues. During box office releases, it had to maintain and scale its apps’ performances in the face of unpredictable workloads.

“Although Village is a big brand, we don’t want to manage backend compliance. We want to focus on business outcomes,” says Arul Arogyanathan, group general manager - technology at Village. The organization explored many providers before it opted for AMS Accelerate operations plan, which augments a team’s capabilities for operating AWS workloads. Village chose AMS for several reasons, including ease of engagement, flexible terms, and the ability to meet migration timelines and other Village requirements. Village achieved the fastest onboarding time for AMS, exceeding the company’s expectations.

Village migrated more than 15 customer-facing applications to AMS in 2 weeks. “Having control and visibility was a key driver for us,” says Arogyanathan. “AMS provided support that made setting up essential features and meeting industry best practices seamless.”

As part of the transition process, Village set up AWS Control Tower, which is used to set up and govern a secure, multiaccount AWS environment. The company set up guardrails for near-real-time visibility into AWS resources and underwent an AWS Well-Architected review to check the resilience and efficiency of its workflows. “Our experience with AMS was incredibly smooth and flexible,” says Arogyanathan. “Despite the global operations of the service, we never felt disconnected.” Village now uses more than 100 AWS services.

By choosing the AMS Accelerate operations plan, Village gained the flexibility to select the level of operational support that it needed. The plan features an infrastructure management solution, including operational monitoring, event response, detection, backup, and restoration. Village had increased backup compliance by 69 percent.

As a result, Village has 96 percent of incidents generated by AMS through the proactive monitoring and management capabilities of its infrastructure. The company is maintaining a strong security posture, and it has enhanced visibility. Village has also implemented dashboards including a compliance dashboard, operating risk dashboard, and financial management dashboard and established an automated event workflow, a process by which incidents are elevated to AMS and the Village team for human involvement.

Village also optimized its spending through AWS Trusted Advisor, which provides recommendations to follow AWS best practices. AWS Trusted Adviser is used to reduce costs, optimize AWS infrastructure, improve security and performance, and monitor service quotas. For its compute needs, the company uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which provides secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload. Now, Village can identify when it can achieve cost optimization by using a combination of AWS Savings Plans, a flexible pricing model that can help businesses reduce bills by up to 72 percent compared with On-Demand prices, and Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances—which provide a significant discount compared with On-Demand pricing.

“Cost management is a key driver for us,” says Arogyanathan. “Village analyzes cost trends monthly. We plan initiatives and try to achieve key performance indicator targets.” Village plans these cost-optimization initiatives alongside technical account managers using AWS Enterprise On-Ramp. Village reduced its Amazon EC2 spend by 21.4 percent by using AWS Savings Plans. The company also reduced spending on Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS)—a collection of managed services that makes it simple to set up, operate, and scale databases in the cloud—by 9.1 percent.

With over 1,000 physical assets in its portfolio, Village gained insight into system resilience and scalability that made it possible to take actionable steps to facilitate fault tolerance. With an Amazon EC2 uptime of more than 99.99 percent, the company was able to maintain the performance, resilience, and availability of its applications. With support from AMS, Village has increased its speed to market and agility, and it can test business initiatives with limited delivery timelines. Internal teams align with the business to deliver better customer experience and generate revenue rather than spending extra time addressing technical incidents. Because AMS is fully managed, the organization launched a digital food-and-beverage offering without handling backend configuration, resource scaling, or data centers.

Village gained access to expert subject knowledge from AMS to drive innovation into business initiatives. Now, Village is rolling out instructor-led and in-person training and materials. Currently, AWS is providing 1 year of training to more than 70 of the company’s staff on various aspects, from security to cloud foundation and architectural best practices. Village is also considering using AMS Operations on Demand services, which gives customers access to additional AMS operations capacity, skills, and experience.

The company is soon planning to migrate its SAP to AWS. It is already running its corporate and payment portals, its in-movie venue experiences like the digital food-and-beverage service, and its ticketing system on AWS. “AMS provides a virtually infinite service with excellent visibility on our assets’ compliance, security, and resilience,” says Arogyanathan. “We can now focus on business and customer engagement rather than worry about day-to-day technology operations.”