XL Axiata Transforms into a Cloud-First Telco with AWS

Digital transformation is just as much about people as it is about technology. What good is cutting-edge IT if employees don’t know how—or are scared—to use it?

XL Axiata chose Amazon Web Services (AWS) to help establish its Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE), a program designed to initiate its employees into cloud operations. For a traditional business running from its own data center for more than 20 years, there’s a lot to learn. “AWS is helping us create a foundation to realize our digital transformation with an optimized cloud infrastructure. This includes examining our current processes and mapping them to best practices in line with our vision,” Yessie says.

The focus of the CCoE is to empower teams across the organization to own their projects and become change agents for modern telco operations. Security and privacy by design are key principles in the new approach to business. One of the first tasks of the CCoE was to set up an AWS Landing Zone, which provides a baseline environment for identity and access management, governance, and data security.

XL Axiata is currently running over 70 initiatives with more than 100 smaller projects. Its security team comprises just 10 members, while the telco employs about 80 developers. “With so many simultaneous projects and a small security team, a security mindset needs to be embedded in developers at the start of coding,” explains Yessie.

Provisioning resources, even for XL Axiata’s mission-critical workloads such as SAP, often took 6–8 weeks in the data center. On AWS, provisioning is accomplished in a matter of hours, or 1–2 days for large projects.

“Our development and innovation cycles are much faster now because there are so many tools available at our fingertips. Previously, we had to think about configuration and how best to accomplish every single step; on AWS, everything is already set up and we have the right service for each use case,” says Yessie.

XL Axiata is now running SAP S/4HANA on AWS, and has found resource provisioning much more straightforward on the AWS Cloud. “Right-sizing instances on AWS is like choosing a T-shirt; you’ve got small, medium, large … all the templates are there, so it’s easier and faster to adopt than in the data center,” explains Yessie.

Like many of its industry peers, XL Axiata used to overprovision its on-premises infrastructure to ensure availability for its customers because avoiding downtime and outages is a top priority for telcos. This approach was safe but led to resource waste and higher costs. “On AWS, we no longer need to overprovision our compute capacity; we can simply pay for what we need,” says Yessie.

The telco estimates a 30 percent cost saving on AWS by the time it completes its full migration in 2022. In addition to right-sizing instances, XL Axiata is also planning to use Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (Amazon EC2) Reserved Instances, Savings Plan, and Amazon EC2 Spot Instances to save costs.

Scaling is also much quicker on the AWS Cloud, about twice as fast as on premises. The transition from a monolith to microservices architecture with containers has given XL Axiata greater agility to quickly respond to new opportunities. The company is now using Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) for container orchestration across its technology stack.

Shortly after beginning its AWS Cloud migration journey, XL Axiata subscribed to AWS Enterprise Support for expert advice on architecture and how to control costs as it scales. “One thing that really differentiates AWS is their support and their intention to make us successful. They’re continually discussing with us on how to optimize our software and configurations,” says Yessie.

To learn more, visit aws.amazon.com/telecom.