Using AWS, Senao has improved online security, eliminated downtime, and reduced the time and effort required to maintain company systems. It was able to launch its e-commerce site within a month of beginning development. “If we had built the site on a traditional data center, I think it would have taken us almost a year,” says Chang.

Today the e-commerce site has about 10,000 visits per month and brings in about 20 percent of total revenue. Although it is not a primary driver of business, the site serves Senao’s business goal of “online to offline,” encouraging people to visit its stores to boost transaction volume.

Chang admits that before AWS, Senao lacked strong security protocols, making the firm vulnerable to intrusions. Now, AWS WAF helps protect company websites and the POS system, and all customer data is encrypted using AWS KMS. “For every system access on AWS, we can easily view stored logs on Amazon S3 and parcel through all the logs to find the hacker or unauthorized person trying to access our data center,” says Chang. “Once we implemented AWS WAF and automated control with Lambda, we were about 90% faster in finding problems with our website and POS systems.”

Migration of the CRM system was simple, and in the 3 months since project completion, there has been no downtime reported. This virtually unlimited availability and automatic scaling have resulted in far less maintenance time for engineers and developers. Senao has set the system to auto-scale overnight without interrupting big processing jobs for its database. For systems maintenance, what was once a four-hour daily workload has been reduced to 90 minutes, cutting processing time by 63 percent.

Chang says the team is now very happy with the convenience of its AWS platform. “We don’t need to wait for any resources or consider capacity for our resources ahead of time. Developers just open a case [when they need more computing power] and DevOps will assign new resources to them so they can keep on developing their projects.”

With the time saved, Chang’s team has been able to undergo more in-depth training, and all 3 team members will take the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate exam this year. They are also working on new analytics projects involving data on user behavior collected on the e-commerce site and through the new POS system, and they are testing Amazon Redshift as a data warehouse. Senao is considering another project for next year using Amazon Athena to analyze data logs for automation reports.

For Senao, moving to the cloud has opened new doors of opportunity for the next stage of business. Chang concludes, “When you start using AWS, you will never go back to traditional data centers.”