Electrica Furnizare's 99.5% website performance boost and cloud migration secrets with Zitec and AWS

For businesses seeking enhanced performance, security, and scalability, finding and implementing the right solution is pivotal to conquering technological challenges and revolutionizing operations for a brighter, more resilient future. 

This is what Electrica Furnizare SA - a renowned, privately-owned electricity supplier for households and business consumers in Romania - considered when they ventured into a new era of technological excellence. Faced with challenges that affected customer experience, website availability, and performance, they implemented AWS-based solutions to optimize stability and scalability. 

From reducing downtimes to near-zero levels to safeguarding sensitive data with AWS-managed secure disk and WAF Firewall, the journey unfolded with impressive results. In this article, we unveil the secrets behind Electrica Furnizare's successful digital migration to the cloud, shedding light on the importance in driving innovation and ensuring uninterrupted service, while reducing maintenance overheads and data risk.

The partnership: Empowering service continuity with Zitec & Amazon Web Services (AWS) 

Having a customer base of over 3.2 million nationwide, Electrica Furnizare (EFSA) initially sought a partner to assist with website maintenance, along with UI/UX enhancements and insights into user behavior. In their quest to optimize customer experience, improve uptime, deliver uninterrupted service continuity, and depart from its single-server, monolith-based infrastructure, Electrica Furnizare’s ultimate goal was to avoid low response times, connectivity issues, and total service disruption.

In addition, the company was also strongly drawn towards embracing Amazon Web Services cloud-based solutions for its digital transformation. 15+ years of expertise in delivering cost-effective AWS cloud-based solutions were the main reason EFSA’s team considered tapping into Zitec's expertise. They selected us as their digital transformation partner because we perfectly fulfilled all the criteria outlined in EFSA's selection process and we stood out from the competitors as an agile, flexible, and highly experienced company.

Therefore, we demonstrated to them we are a company with a keen understanding of their vision for UI/UX updates, having the know-how to help in the AWS proficient implementation processes and the underlying infrastructure challenges impacting the website.

The challenge posed by Electrica Furnizare’s infrastructure

Zitec's solution architects thoroughly examined the challenge and assessed EFSA's web server infrastructure. Throughout the cloud assessment process, we discovered several areas of improvement in order to achieve higher availability standards:

• despite the well-maintained web server, EFSA's manually configured hardware and patchworked infrastructure presented risks of potential errors 
• the website's infrastructure experienced higher downtime than the set objective
• website disruptions almost every Thursday, due to the lack of disk space
• EFSA wanted to better mitigate the risk of data loss from hardware or software malfunctions, as well as threats from malicious actors

Zitec’s proposition of an AWS cloud-based transformation solution

As trusted consultants with knowledge of AWS technologies, Zitec’s experts ensured guidance and designed a setup that could scale seamlessly in terms of availability and performance. The motivation behind embracing an AWS cloud-based solution was driven by multiple convincing factors:

• AWS is a trusted and well-established company in the market.
• Since its founding in 2006, AWS has had an impressive track record. 
• AWS perfectly complemented Electrica's existing internal competencies, which enabled them to efficiently manage the cloud solutions autonomously, after the initial setup.
• AWS was the convenient and most efficient solution, because it seamlessly integrated with other AWS services already in use internally in EFSA’s systems.

Cloud Services migration, development, and maintenance

To enhance website availability and performance, our specialists implemented efficient AWS-based cloud solutions. Through a seamless migration of EFSA's entire infrastructure to the cloud, we ensured stability, high availability, and scalability. Leveraging Amazon Load Balancer, Autoscaling Groups, and deploying AWS RDS for MySQL databases played a key role in achieving these improvements.

Security & DevOps: safeguarding the infrastructure and website

To address the security concerns and enhance EFSA’s infrastructure, we proposed an update to the procedures, introducing a robust recovery plan. In order to achieve uninterrupted services and data protection, while avoiding potential disruptions, we employed an automated backup procedure using AWS-managed services. Additionally, modern development processes were implemented through AWS-compatible containerization to ensure up-to-date practices.

Once the causes of the outages were addressed, Zitec's DevOps team was able to focus on improving EFSA's security regarding their sensitive data storage. By migrating the data onto an AWS-managed secure disk, Electrica Furnizare ensured enhanced protection. To further safeguard the website from common cyber attacks, Zitec deployed a WAF Firewall, bolstering its defense mechanisms.

The results of Electrica Furnizare’s digital transformation

With the AWS solutions in place, EFSA observed a rapid 99.5% boost in website performance. Downtimes have been dramatically reduced, maintaining a 99.99% uptime - a significant increase from the weekly down periods experienced before migration to AWS. Namely, Electrica improved client experience and ensured consumers can easily connect with their utility provider.

Changing the backup procedure successfully resolved EFSA’s web downtimes. This specific solution and the implementation of a reliable recovery procedure effectively mitigated the risks of data corruption and loss.

Finally, AWS-managed services and automation offered cost-effective solutions, minimizing maintenance costs and the oversight needed from EFSA's technicians. It ensured the infrastructure's continuous operation, reducing the risk of human error.

The transition to AWS enabled Electrica Furnizare to take control of in-house maintenance and maximize the benefits of cloud-based solutions for their operations.

How your business can achieve higher availability with Zitec and AWS

Zitec's collaboration with Electrica Furnizare showcases the power of AWS in revolutionizing businesses. By adopting AWS-based solutions, your business can achieve higher availability, enhanced performance, and robust security. AWS empowers you to scale seamlessly and meet increasing demands, availing yourself from the downtime burden and connectivity issues. 

Our expertise ensures a smooth migration and personalized solutions tailored to your unique needs. Together with AWS, we can pave the way to your business's success and elevate your operations to new heights, ensuring a more resilient and thriving future in the ever-evolving digital landscape. Contact us to find out how.