Moving to AWS (Amazon Web Services) Cloud, Ensuring IT moves in the speed of business

PT. Garudafood Putra Putri Jaya Tbk (GOOD) is one of the leading companies within FMCG (fast moving consumer goods) in Indonesia. The company start its business activities as food and beverage company in 1979 run by the founder’s family under the name of PT Tudung Putrajaya (“TPJ”). As a company in Pati, Central Java, TPJ marketed peanut products under the brand name Kacang Garing Garuda, which later in 1994 was known as Kacang Garuda.
 
Since the last couple of decades, Garudafood already integrate IT-centric operation into their business, application becomes more and more valuable part of business, especially for sales, logistics & manufacturing teams. They always adopt & invest in technology that they believe will help the business grow, compete in the market & ultimately provide good experience to their customer.

Digital transformation becomes a necessity, and as a result, it’s been a biggest challenge for IT to provide infrastructure & necessary resources as soon as the business require. Rather than investing big & managing complex infrastructure, network & security; it became clearer that a cloud-first approach is the right way to go.

“We know integrating cloud service into our IT is unavoidable. Global public cloud offer services that can scale-up our business operation, offer the most value & is the right choice for us.” said Johanes Hartanto, Chief of Corporate Information Technology of Garudafood.

Cloud service is the way to go these days, where almost any kind service & tools required by application developer team can be made available within minutes. No more waiting time for approval & delivery. This means, reach the market & do your business faster.

“The next questions, how & where should we start with this cloud adoption?” continued Johanes, “We’ve had some ongoing infrastructure refreshment plan and upcoming new apps such as e-recruitments, online catalog & order booking, customer web support & service, as well as some internal mobile apps for back office.”

Technical valuation of multiple cloud vendor, along with commercial review was done by Garudafood, with the help of Metrodata as Partner.

“After 3 months of evaluation, in which we had the firsthand experience of using AWS cloud, we came into conclusion that AWS & Metrodata is the right choice for us. AWS has the best SLA, easy to operate, comes with proper security control & its marketplace also allow us to provide necessary extra security features & more” Johanes said
 
Easy to integrate, Complete Documentation & Tech Guideline

Not every cloud is built the same & not every cloud provides the same level of ease when moving & building workload in the cloud, let alone enhance it. As pioneer among Global Cloud Provider, AWS provides each & every customer with the most complete technical guideline with various workloads, ranging from ERP, databases, web application even specific/uncommon services.

“This also played a factor of why we chose AWS, other than AWS marketplace where we can integrate our cloud with services from our preferred technology vendor; they also have a very complete whitepaper & architecture documentation of various workloads which we can access freely” said Johanes.

With this, customer who are looking to migrate more or create new workload in AWS cloud can rest assure, they will have insight on how to do this with AWS from the very beginning. Along with Metrodata who can provide expertise of various workload on AWS (ERP, Big Data, windows workload, databases, devops, etc), moving to cloud & keeping it optimized is not a painful process.

“AWS cloud services prices are become more tolerable and justifiable from value perspective. We know it’s the proper cloud that we need now & in the future.” Said Johanes as closing statement.
 
Challenges:

1. Ensure infrastructure available & ready whenever business need it.
2. Flexible OPEX model, rather than investing big from the start 
3. Integrating Amazon Web Services, a pay per use, secure & flexible cloud model to keep up with the fast-paced changes of application & service’s needs.
4. Developing a cloud migration roadmap, designing and socializing a cloud migration roadmap for all impacted workload owners from both IT and business. 
5. Installing a centralized cloud team, creating a centralized cloud center of excellence that includes all aspects of IT (compute, database, storage, network), finance, business, and security to provide consultation and a standardized set of solutions to development teams.

Solution

Integrating Amazon Web Services, a pay per use, secure & flexible cloud model to keep up with the fast-paced changes of application & services needs.

Benefits:

1. OPEX model, justified investment, as what we pay, is what you use.
2. Complete Technical Guidance & Architectural Reference in AWS.
3. Widely-used cloud, more vendor familiar with AWS technology, compared to local cloud vendor
4. Operational resilience, availability of mission-critical applications, significant decreases in downtime.
5. Business Agility, Garudafood now focus their attention on increasing speed to market and experimenting with new innovations.