Case studies
More security and flexibility for LORENZ through the AWS public cloud
The case study titled “More Security and Flexibility for LORENZ through the AWS Public Cloud” details how Skaylink helped LORENZ, a leading international food manufacturer, enhance its security and flexibility by migrating its IT infrastructure to the AWS Public Cloud. LORENZ faced challenges with its existing on-premises infrastructure, including scalability issues and limited disaster recovery capabilities. By partnering with Skaylink, LORENZ successfully migrated its infrastructure to AWS, improving security, scalability, and disaster recovery capabilities while reducing costs.
Starting situation at LORENZ
LORENZ Life Sciences Group was looking for a way to optimize the customer experience and further develop international cloud operations for customer solutions. With Skaylink’s Cloud Baselining consulting service, LORENZ found a customized and structured path. In a collaborative partnership on equal footing, stumbling blocks were quickly identified and a successful path was taken together.
The analyses are adapted to general trends, specific trends or selected target groups as needed in the shortest amount of time possible.
The AI models required for this are supplied with data and evaluated on a cloud-based platform and further developed and continuously updated in a DevOps process.
Uncertainties before deciding on the public cloud
LORENZ Life Sciences Group hosted a private cloud on its own server space. In addition, there was already a proof of concept for the Amazon Web Services (AWS) public cloud in existence. LORENZ was aware of the potential of the public cloud to achieve business and IT-focused goals more quickly. On the business side, LORENZ expected the public cloud to allow it to expand services for customers and improve the customer experience. On the IT side, increasing available cloud resources, eliminating user restrictions and harmonizing or simplifying the IT architecture were of key importance. Using a cloud provider also provided opportunities for autoscaling, shortening time-to-market for products in the cloud and cost flexibility, which were other attractive goals for LORENZ. However, there were also many open questions about the path to the public cloud:
Is one cloud provider enough, should backups continue to be maintained “on-premises” and is there a contingency plan in place? What happens to existing infrastructure components? LORENZ was also interested in the requirements that would have to be met to enter new markets and in how long the transition would take.
Cloud Baselining: Orientation for the path to the cloud
The central topics at LORENZ were strategy, IT security and compliance, architecture with a focus on the initial situation and objectives, and the operating model. These were divided into workstreams and tackled. The constructive atmosphere in the discussions allowed an open exchange and quick results. LORENZ’s key players took part – from developers and IT operations staff to COO Dr. Philipp Wiederhold.
Solutions implemented
AWS Public Cloud:
- Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud)
- Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service)
- Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
- AWS Lambda
- AWS CloudFormation
- AWS Security Services (e.g., AWS IAM)
- Disaster Recovery Solutions
The potential of the public cloud: Scalability and new markets
Due to its geo-availability, the public cloud makes it easier to deploy the infrastructure to a defined standard in other countries. This means that LORENZ can more easily tap into new markets in the USA and the Pacific region, for example, while using the extensive cloud services.
Shared responsibility: Provider and customer share responsibility
Action Packs adopted: As a result of the Cloud Baselining workshops, Action Packs were adopted. The central items were defining and implementing IT security measures, defining measures for the technical infrastructure, working out compliance requirements and ensuring data protection. The Action Packs were created as concepts: They included a security and a crypto concept, backup and disaster recovery, a user management concept and a risk assessment, among other things. Moreover, concepts were established for cloud change management, logging monitoring and cloud validation, as well as data privacy. All Action Packs contain sub-tasks that were handed over to the LORENZ developers.
Roadmap charts the path to the public cloud
The Cloud Baselining workshops produced a roadmap that contains the rough planning for the following activities as well as a cost estimate that LORENZ can use to take the strategic steps to migrate from the private to the public cloud.
One key finding for LORENZ was that operational activities need to be more strictly separated from further development. The plan also includes qualification, staff recruitment and the completion of internal work to bring products to the cloud.
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