Regional energy company improves business agility with cloud migration

Business Challenge

A regional energy company that provides electric and natural gas service to homes and businesses sought to increase business agility through migration to cloud-based technology. This required moving the public-facing website and deploying SAP HANA on the back-end all within the cloud environment.

Solution

With security of utmost concern for its cloud and database environments, the customer purchased Palo Alto VM-Series Firewalls and Palo Alto Panorama Management Console. Because the customer did not have the internal expertise required to integrate AWS, Palo Alto Network’s Security Operating Platform, and an advanced network topology, the company engaged Lightstream to architect the cloud network, deploy the security controls in AWS, and integrate the entire solution.

Lightstream designed a secure ingress transit VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) architecture to support the deployment. The transit VPC connects multiple geographically dispersed VPCs and remote networks effectively to create a global-network transit routing gateway. This helps simplify and automate network management and minimizes the number of connections required to interconnect all VPCs and remote networks.

Lightstream then used AWS VPC Endpoint Services (PrivateLink) to connect the remote VPCs.  Identity and Access Management (IAM) SSO was used to restrict staff access to AWS based on roles. AWS CloudFormation templates were developed to quickly and reliably provision the services and applications.

Because the customer is regulated by the U.S. energy industry standard NERC (North American Reliability Corporation), Lightstream engineers completed NERC certification to deliver a regulatory-compliant solution to the customer.

Business Outcomes

The move to AWS will provide the customer with a more agile, flexible, and scalable infrastructure to support its business. SAP HANA will have limitless storage and compute power to store and retrieve data for applications, and the public-facing website will require less hands-on time from the customer’s IT staff to host and manage.

Thanks to Lightstream and Palo Alto Networks, the level of security protection maintained by the customer on-premise will now be extended to the cloud.

Why Lightstream

As an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, Lightstream helps organizations address, design and managing AWS cloud migration and security plans. Our team of experts provide a full portfolio of services ranging from AWS Analytics to AWS Cloud Optimization and Containment Services, AWS Consolidated Billing Services, AWS Chatbot Solutions, AWS Direct Connect, and AWS CloudFront.