Boosting Public Transportation with AWS

To ensure that its customers travel comfortably, Aare Seeland mobil AG continuously invests in modern facilities, vehicles, and a reliable customer information system. To provide the necessary future IT infrastructure, the regional Swiss public transport company started its journey to the cloud. With the help of a “lift-and-shift” migration, SoftwareONE quickly and easily made part of the local data and applications available in AWS. This provided Aare Seeland mobil AG with the desired flexibility and reliability and noticeably reduced the investment costs for maintaining its previous on-premises infrastructure.

Aare Seeland mobil AG is a modern, regional passenger transport company based in Langenthal, Switzerland. Around 280 employees provide comprehensive services in regional traffic, transport, and tourism. Every year, the company transports 6.5 million people by train and bus in the Oberaargau, Solothurn, and Seeland regions.

Aare Seeland mobil AG wanted to reduce the high investment costs for on-premises infrastructure. However, in testing public cloud advantages, applications and data still required immediate availability without special adjustments. Since the company already had expertise in Amazon Web Services (AWS), moving part of its workload directly to the AWS cloud made sense. This reduced the on-premises workload quickly, and it also permitted the company to test a solution to distribute usage costs more precisely to individual users.

To test AWS cloud benefits quickly and without using additional resources, Aare Seeland chose the IaaS cloud model and opted for a "lift-and-shift" data and application migration from on-premises servers to AWS. The transport company engaged SoftwareONE to realize the migration project, leveraging its long-standing and extensive expertise in AWS migrations.
Using the AWS Application Migration Service provides the advantage that workloads can be moved and started as a virtual machine immediately after data replication. With minimal server downtime, data and applications are up and running quickly after migration.

“By connecting our on-premises infrastructure to the AWS cloud, we are more flexible and can react more quickly to unexpected events, such as a hardware failure.” – Nadine Wickord, Head of System Technology at Aare Seeland mobil AG.

SoftwareONE created an AWS landing zone master account and interconnected sub-accounts using the AWS Transit Gateway. The AWS Directory Service serves as the user repository for on-premises two-way domain trusts. This makes it possible to create local user or group permissions for managing the AWS account structure.

• Greater flexibility is established by connecting the on-premises servers to the AWS cloud, enabling rapid reaction times e.g. in the event of a hardware failure.
  
• High availability of data is assured in the AWS cloud.
  
• Easily scalable: New resources can be added quickly and easily if the provided cloud capacities are not sufficient.
• The division into sub-accounts provides an excellent overview when assigning the workloads to related projects or project groups. It also enables a clear assignment of the consumption costs to the sub-accounts or project groups.
  
• More security & transparency through a multi-account environment: Permissions for specific areas in the AWS cloud can be assigned to specific individuals.
  
• Significant cost savings compared to new hardware investments.