With AWS, Kyowa Hakko Kirin was able to quickly and easily get its servers up for testing. The fact that doing so was inexpensive was very attractive. The company left the low-cost verification to its leads group, and there was no need to procure hardware. "One of the greatest factors in the growth of AWS throughout the company would have to be the passion it incites in our engineers," says Toshiyuki Shinoda, director of information systems.  

At present, Kyowa Hakko Kirin has 31 systems and 69 servers running on the AWS Cloud. As of September 2015, about 40 percent of the data from the company's physical data centers has been transferred to the AWS Cloud. Almost all of the transferrable data will be migrated within the next two or three years.

Kyowa Hakko Kirin's shift to a cloud-first mentality has been affected not only by how much faster it can bring servers online, test them, verify them, and change resources when needed, but also by the reduction in costs due to moving to the cloud. "One example is our new ability to significantly cut costs associated with using reserved instances for systems that run 24/7. In addition, we have been able to achieve even greater cost reductions by fine-tuning a variety of things, including pulling together similar systems onto the same servers, halting instances that do not need to run on weekends, and powering down after performing backups, even on weekdays," says Shinoda.

Kyowa Hakko Kirin migrates existing systems to the cloud whenever those systems need to be updated. The company has one core system in operation since its days of adopting a client/server model that it calls its ''Enterprise HUB.'' This system and the business systems connected to it are currently being migrated to the AWS Cloud.

The Enterprise HUB stores transaction data from the business systems. The Enterprise HUB is connected in a loosely coupled format to the business systems that handle sales, logistics and sales support as a module. The module includes retail products, SaaS components, and products developed in-house. Model conversions within the internal logic for the module occur automatically. Since it is modular, swapping out business systems is easy.

"Although we have nearly completed the migration of our core systems to the AWS Cloud, including the Enterprise HUB, one major reason for the comparatively smooth transition has been our base in this architecture," says Shinoda.