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.
