Customer Overview
Germany-headquartered but operating worldwide, Rhenus Freight Logistics GmbH provides logistics services. It offers transport, controlling and optimizing the entire transport chain, part-load and full-load transportation, and interface control using barcode scanning. Rhenus experienced super growth during the pandemic, expanding to Germany, South Africa, India, US and Canada. The migration project started as a small-scale project in Singapore, and was later expanded across the countries.
Challenge
Amid the fast growth during the pandemic, Rhenus found it hard to scale with their previous infrastructure due to rising costs from operating an on-premises data center, given increasing data volume and analytics use cases. Some of their hardware was also obsolete. The data center environment lacked security and access controls, and there was no standard process or guidelines when it comes to deploying these data resources. Moreover, billings were not consolidated, leading to gaps in reporting.
Solution
Cloud Comrade helped Rhenus scale by moving from on-prem to AWS cloud, providing support and helping it capture cost optimization opportunities. Before, Rhenus stored multiple apps in over 40 silo accounts on their data center with no visibility into resources being used, leading to resource wastage and forgotten accounts. With AMS, Rhenus has a single pane of view for billing and accounts. The project was a success in Singapore and Rhenus later rolled it out across other countries.
Results
AMS landing zones were built, on which different IT infrastructures from acquired organizations can easily integrate as Rhenus acquired these businesses globally. AMS out-of-box security and compliance helped Rhenus meet each country’s compliance standards. With AMS, Rhenus transitioned seamlessly to the cloud as it guardrails for unexpected or incorrect changes in their new IT environment. We also set up interconnectivity between Regions to enable global networking optimization.
Rhenus saved operations cost due to increased internal efficiency. The lower TCO allowed them to easily scale and expand into 5 new markets. Using AWS CloudFormation for application delivery, the time needed for delivering improvements for their customer-facing mobile app was shortened from weeks to days. With new features development time shortened, engineers have time to focus on innovation. AMS security and out-of-box compliance enabled them to achieve global IT compliance.
Additional Notes
Rhenus’s on-prem infrastructure couldn’t scale to support growing demand and wasn’t agile enough to support its business expansion worldwide. Cloud Comrade helped Rhenus to build AMS landing zones on which different IT infrastructures from acquired organizations can be easily integrated as Rhenus acquired these businesses globally. Using AWS Cloudformation, we shortened Rhenus’ Recovery Time Objective (RTO) by simulating disaster recovery from a different AWS Region and empowering Rhenus with backups in other regions in case one fails. Rhenus also had better confidence in the deployment of the solution as they received support from AMS Operations on how to manage the transition. By consolidating their billings on AWS Organizations, Rhenus increased their reporting efficiency by easily tracking their cost and usage data. Besides minimizing their reporting gap at no additional cost, Rhenus could take advantage of volume pricing discounts and savings plans to lower their TCO further.
