Passengers travelling on a bus, train, or subway today are just as likely to pay with their mobile phone or smart card as they are to use cash or paper tickets, but these innovations rely on intelligent information systems to link them all together. Based in Turkey and with customers ranging across the region from Pakistan to Poland, Kentkart develops these intelligent transportation systems, including automated fare collection, passenger information, and video surveillance. Its products help improve the experience for passengers, while operators can run a more efficient, safe, sustainable service. The company has won international recognition for its services, including, most recently, winning first place at the Contactless & Mobile Awards in the Transportation & Ticketing category
Transport companies rely on Kentkart to keep their systems up and running, and traditionally the company has done this using its own on-premises data centers, buying hardware as needed for each customer’s installations. But as its business grew, so did the management burden for this infrastructure. As Sezai Cam, deputy director general at Kentkart, explains: "We were having to upgrade memory, CPU, and disks frequently on our servers, as well as obtain and manage software licenses. These two areas were costing us time, and—of course—money."
"There is also a risk from construction work," he continues. "The city periodically renovates pipes and underlying infrastructure near our headquarters in Izmir. Several times, the Internet cables connecting our data center to the outside world were cut, meaning we couldn’t provide support to our customers until they were repaired. We needed a way to prevent this, as well as lowering the overhead associated with managing infrastructure." To ease these burdens, Kentkart decided to move to the cloud.
Kentkart started using Amazon Web Services (AWS) in early 2012. “We looked at several cloud providers, and we saw that AWS was the market leader, with the most experience and the most powerful infrastructure,” says Cam. “It has everything we need, now or in the future. It’s great to find all these in one provider.” Kentkart uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for compute, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Glacier for storage, and AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) and AWS Key Management Service (Amazon KMS) for security. And, Cam says, “we’re planning to test more AWS services soon.”
Cam is quick to highlight two AWS services Kentkart finds particularly useful: Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) and the AWS Management Console. “Amazon VPC was one of the biggest influencers on our decision to go with AWS,” he says. “It lets us build a private network in the cloud and connect it to our own site with a direct VPN connection using Amazon VPC, which is PCI DSS and ISO 27001 compliant. The AWS Management Console is easy to use for all our employees, no matter what their level of experience.” The compliance standards that Amazon VPC adheres to means Kentkart can better ensure that sensitive personal and financial data belonging to customers remains protected.
Cam and his team now have an IT infrastructure that helps them prevent downtime, deliver services more quickly, and provide better service to their customers. This, in turn, helps these customers provide better transportation systems.
With AWS, Kentkart has also reduced the cost of running its IT. "With the help of the AWS Management Console, we can securely access our resources from everywhere," Cam says. "It's easier to shut down or reboot a server, or launch one quickly with any configuration we need. It's so much easier than a traditional setup. Added to this is the fact that we can reserve our Amazon EC2 instances for one or two years for an even better price, while still paying our bill monthly. By using AWS, we have cut the costs of our IT by more than 30 percent."
Kentkart uses AWS for a range of mission-critical workloads, including website hosting, file sharing, mobile-application hosting, and the hosting of onboard video-surveillance systems for customers. "Incidents like our outage won’t happen again, because our applications are safely delivered from the AWS Cloud," says Cam. "Working in the AWS Cloud means that we can help public transport operators improve the quality of their services. For example, the video-surveillance system records driver and passenger conduct, and the times of any incidents, and helps prevent unwanted judicial cases. It also maintains the safety of the driver, the vehicle, and the passengers."
To learn more about how AWS can help move your infrastructure to cloud, visit our solutions details page: https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/.