Arista Group Migrates to AWS To Lower IT Costs

In 2020, Arista decided to migrate its infrastructure to Amazon Web Services (AWS). The group had been using another cloud provider, but its management became increasingly frustrated with the lack of local support and transparency in billing. The final straw came when Arista’s cloud computing bill doubled from one month to the next. Despite multiple attempts via phone, email, and in-person meetings to obtain an explanation, Arista’s management still could not understand why their cloud costs had increased.

In speaking to industry colleagues, Fabiano Wiradiputera, IT manager at Arista Group, learned that AWS had a reputation for high-quality support and fair pricing. He reached out to AWS and the team in Indonesia suggested ICS Compute, an AWS Partner with in-depth, localized experience in cloud migrations.

“ICS Compute was an invaluable partner that fully supported our company’s migration. Even though the migration was performed remotely, their team was very responsive anytime we encountered issues or needed technical advice,” Wiradiputera says.

It took Arista and ICS Compute just 2 months to complete a lift-and-shift migration using AWS Application Migration Service (CloudEndure Migration) for data replication across clouds. The process included migrating Arista’s then-current enterprise resource planning system, Microsoft Dynamics AX, and custom-built .NET applications such as its Dealer Management System.

Arista leveraged the AWS Migration Acceleration Program to accelerate its migration process and offset the initial costs of migration. With the help of AWS and ICS Compute, Arista looked to right-size its infrastructure, choosing the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance types with the right pricing model that best suited its workload requirements.

ICS Compute implemented AWS Backup with AWS Lambda as a backup solution in the customer’s environment. Automatic backup is set to occur daily for the previous 7 days’ data. The AWS Lambda function also starts and stops Arista’s development environment according to a determined schedule, typically shutting down non-production environments after business hours. This automated mechanism contributes to predictable, controllable billing each month. Arista has likewise set schedules to scale up server capacity at the end of the month—when accounting and financial reporting occur across its store network—then shut down instances as the following month commences.

Since migrating to AWS, Arista has reduced its monthly IT costs by 20 percent. It has improved visibility into its infrastructure and benefits from transparent billing. “We have more detailed billing information for the resources used and specific costs on AWS. It’s much easier to explain our IT expenditure to our board of directors and justify expenses on a line-item basis,” says Wiradiputera.

ICS Compute has stayed on as a managed service provider for Arista and their team reviews Arista’s bill each month. If there’s a spike in compute utilization, ICS Compute investigates the cause and proactively reports back to Arista. Arista also benefits from the easy-to-use AWS Cost Explorer interface to visualize and manage its AWS Cloud computing costs over time. It can forecast how much the company is likely to spend over the next 12 months and perform more accurate budgeting for new projects.

“Whenever we have a new project, ICS Compute and AWS provide recommendations on which AWS solution to use for the proposed project outcomes. Budgeting is much easier on AWS with tools such as the AWS Cost & Usage Report,” explains Wiradiputera.

Aside from cost control, Arista looked to strengthen its security posture on the AWS Cloud. Prior to migration, Arista experienced a brute force attack due to a lack of adequate security monitoring. To prevent such attacks in its AWS Cloud environment, the business implemented Amazon GuardDuty for intelligent threat detection of malicious IP addresses and domains. Network flows and connectivity logs in its AWS Cloud environment are now constantly checked for abnormalities.

Service availability has also improved, thanks to the support from ICS Compute and AWS. The business was facing availability issues with its previous cloud provider which it could not resolve. Since migrating to AWS, Arista has achieved 99.999% availability.  

The ability to run its operations seamlessly has facilitated Arista Group’s expansion. When the business started using AWS in the spring of 2020, it was managing about 80 branches across Indonesia. Within less than 1 year, this had increased to 117, expanding from five to eight business units with a rising AWS Cloud footprint. All supporting applications—including sales, service, finance, and inventory—are hosted on AWS in a .NET framework with a high level of integration.

The launch of a mobile app enabling customers to book and track service appointments is next on the development roadmap for Arista. The business has also initiated discussions with AWS about a media streaming, video-on-demand project that would enable customers to bid live for automobiles in a virtual auction environment. “With AWS, we can focus on adding more business units and innovate faster at a lower cost,” concludes Wiradiputera.

To learn more, visit thinkwithwp.com/cloud-migration.