The successful cloud migration increased the level of information security, improved cost efficiency, and helps in further development of the service

Elenia’s extranet applications had become divided between on-premises and cloud environment solutions over time. They wanted to uniform their hosting framework by migrating the two remaining server room applications into their Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud platform where other extranet applications already resided.

“Our key focus was to improve security because strong user authentication wasn’t available with our on-premises solutions. This was an acknowledged security risk that we wanted to resolve as quickly as possible“, Elenia’s service manager Jaakko Lehtimäki recounts.

The implementation faced an inflexible deadline: the on-premises solution’s license and hosting contracts were about to expire within a year, and Elenia was unwilling to renew them. Lehtomäki says that continuing with the old solution would have required considerable mid-life upgrades and unprofitable investments in the service platform.

The project was implemented by Gofore’s three-person team working together with Elenia’s software development partner. Gofore established new extranet environments for two customers and migrated their users into the AWS environment, after which the old environment was shut down. The only visible change for end users was the introduction of strong log-on authentication.

“AWS is often a superior option for traditional server room solutions. It helps improve scalability as resources such as memory and disk space are increased automatically when required. This also helps cut costs – you aren’t paying for anything you are not using. Additionally, version management and testing become much easier with AWS“, Gofore’s cloud architect Antti Vitikainen illustrates.

“We initially thought this project would only entail a technical migration from one environment to another. However, we found some additional needs for further development during the project. Luckily Gofore had the ability to react to our wishes on the fly and bring in the required expertise flexibly“, Lehtomäki says.