EGL Tours improves performance, reduces costs with migration to AWS with SoftwareOne

Struggling to scale to meet demand for travel

Japan is one of the most popular holiday destinations for Hong Kong residents. After travel restrictions were lifted, EGL experienced a huge surge in interest from customers, and its website booking engine struggled to cope. Response times were slow, and, in some cases, customers had to wait several seconds for web pages to load. The application also struggled to scale to meet demand when the company ran promotions and marketing campaigns. Migrating the booking application to the cloud seemed the most obvious solution to Alfred Kam, CIO at EGL Tours.

Alfred and EGL Tours had been working with SoftwareOne previously around hardware and software licensing and procurement and were also aware of SoftwareOne’s cloud credentials. The two companies began discussing the feasibility and benefits of a migration to AWS. In addition to the technical and cost decisions, Alfred also needed to develop a business case for his management team that would demonstrate the benefits and provide assurance that migration was the best solution for the company – the booking engine was a critical part of the company’s revenue stream.  

The project team decided to run the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP), a comprehensive and proven cloud migration program based upon AWS’s experience migrating thousands of enterprise customers to the cloud.

A 70% saving in infrastructure costs on AWS

EGL worked with SoftwareOne and AWS during Q1 2024 to conduct the cloud migration. The initial stage was an assessment of EGL Tours’ existing on-premises environment to identify the potential opportunities and benefits for migrating its workloads. SoftwareOne’s in-depth knowledge of EGL Tours’ existing hardware was instrumental during this stage. Following the assessment, the team turned to migration planning and started developing a detailed plan and documentation.

Critically, the assessment also helped Alfred show his management team the estimated return on investment from migrating to AWS. The business case is clear, with a projected reduction in the annual total cost of ownership (TCO) of 35% annually by moving all workloads to AWS. Included in that lower TCO is a 70% savings in infrastructure costs compared to continuing to host it on premises, according to Alfred. The migration enabled EGL to move to an OpEx rather than a CapEx model, which also helps maintain a healthy cash flow.

With the management team signed off on the proposal, the project team gradually involved additional internal stakeholders such as the information technology, sales and marketing teams so all key requirements were captured, and the migration plan was understood. “We had a very open environment with a lot of discussions,” says Alfred. “If our team found an issue, they just raised it for discussion. Every week, we’d have a meeting to find a resolution and then test and test and test again.” 

The company also wanted to enhance the security of its system to further protect customer privacy and protect payment data. To do this, SoftwareOne set up the F5 WAF (Web Application Firewall), procured via the AWS Marketplace, to protect the web application from common exploits. EGL Tours chose to add second-tier Fortinet firewalls to the AWS workspace, as well as monitoring tools to analyse network activity.

SoftwareOne conducted the pilot phase setup of systems on AWS during Q2 and Q3 in 2024. Load balancing tests demonstrated that running the site on AWS would give EGL Tours a clear performance advantage over the on-premises environment. In tests, the AWS environment delivered success rates of above 99% at high levels of total concurrency.

The project also allowed EGL Tours to improve elements of its system to enhance the user experience, specifically to enable customers to find and book holidays and trips more easily on any device. The streamlining of the website included the development of a responsive, mobile-friendly design and improvements to the application’s search engine.

When a prior system glitch threatened the go-live for the migration, SoftwareOne and AWS engineers stepped in and found the issue – a misconfigured web application file – and were able to keep the plan on track. With the project teams confident that they were ready to go, Alfred gave the green light for go-live, and, within a couple of minutes, the website was live on AWS.