After migrating its first Settrade workload onto the AWS Cloud, the company immediately benefited from improved scalability. At its peak, the trading platform can now accommodate 100,000 simultaneous logins—without compromising system performance or experiencing any downtime. Its user experience has also received positive feedback from international customers on how the speed of data access is significantly better.

The greatest benefit of shifting to the AWS Cloud is the speed of innovation. SET can get new products to market much faster than with its on-premises or domestic cloud servers because of quick security and compliance checks as well as the agility offered by AWS infrastructure as a service. Developers are empowered to immediately provision resources and test new ideas from the expansive AWS catalogue toolkit. Wuthi-udomlert says, “With AWS, our data scientists can really focus on data modeling and other aspects that add value to the business instead of spending time making infrastructure choices and implementing things on our own.”

The LiVE platform is proof of faster time-to-market. Sanpakit says, “We created LiVE, our comprehensive service platform, in just eight months. This was something we could not have accomplished if we had not used AWS Cloud services.”

Compliance with international standards such as ISO 27001 and FIPS-140-2 is built into AWS native offerings such as AWS Key Management Service, which streamlined approval by the SEC. SET estimates 20–30 percent time savings from this built-in compliance feature. Wuthi-udomlert says, “Using services that were already standards-compliant meant our regulatory concerns were very minimal. Had blockchain-friendly services such as AWS Key Management Service not been there, we would have spent at least an additional one or two months testing and designing our own key management system.”

Sanpakit also highlights data security as an advantage of the AWS Cloud, particularly when large-scale patches and updates are needed to respond to threats such as Meltdown and Spectre. “This is one of the major cost savings in terms of handling cyberthreats. AWS gives us a lot of confidence that our system is taken care of by an expert team and that they will be one of the first in the market to respond to such vulnerabilities,” Sankapit says. “If we had to maintain the system ourselves, it would have taken much longer to plan, test, and deploy mitigations.”

For its third phase of cloud adoption, starting in 2018, SET plans to migrate its data warehouse onto the AWS Cloud and begin experimenting with AI and machine learning. “Having all transactional data and user information already in the cloud makes it a seamless next step to bring up the analytics aspect,” Wuthi-udomlert says. So far, the learning curve with the AWS Cloud has been minimal. “The services from AWS are really straightforward,” he adds. “As someone who is not a system engineer, I looked at the menu and felt it was all understandable. Documentation is easy to access, and since AWS is the prevailing choice among IT teams, there is plenty of help available in the market.”