NRG fulfills compliance requirements with AWS migration

SHI’s full cloud assessment leads to cost optimization, app modernization, and data center migration.

Challenge:

NRG – an integrated power company engaged in producing, selling, and delivering power and related products across the U.S. – utilizes advanced compute and application technologies to bring their services to market.

The customer needed to modernize their core web applications and scheduling system databases to address digital transformation efforts and stringent security and compliance requirements. With their original IT environment heavily rooted in traditional compute, NRG wanted to move toward a public cloud provider like AWS.

NRG hosted its applications across 50 VMs and three environments, all of which needed to be migrated from a hybrid on-premises DC/AWS implementation to a pure AWS implementation in a different AWS account and AWS region. Data continuity, preservation, and migration were critical requirements, as well as setting up the new AWS account, VPCs, and VMs – all using IAC and SCM.

To fulfill the compliance requirements and migrate their services from an open-source virtual machine hosting to AWS – a provider they were already familiar with – within their project timeline, NRG turned to SHI for help.

Solution:

To move out of the existing hosted environment and into AWS in a well-architected, performant, and compliant fashion, SHI completed a comprehensive Cloud Assessment, along with dependency mapping to give an unbiased, multi-cloud provider feasibility and cost assessment.

Next, SHI completed a data continuity plan by leveraging native AWS tools like CloudFormation, EC2, EFS, ALB, NLB, and ASGs. In addition, SHI fully automated the deployment processes, using Infrastructure as Code and CI/CD tooling across the newly created AWS accounts and services.

Once planning was complete, SHI migrated and tested NRG’s lower environments, using automated processes and provided ongoing cost optimization services.

After each phase of the migration – proof of concept, integration testing, and full migration – our team validated all code by testing and implementing across the lower environments and then promoting the code into each environment through production. Furthermore, SHI helped NRG establish a well-defined and refined DevOps approach, using CI/CD tooling to ensure these unique environments were fully documented via code in SCM and maintained compliance and ease of use.

Outcome:

As a result of this project spanning from August to December 2022, the NRG team now has a modernized, documented, and automated environment that is secure, reliable, efficient, and cost-effective. The new environment not only met the customer’s security and compliance requirements, it also aligned with AWS’ well-architected strategy and ensured a solid foundation for NRG as they expand their usage within the platform.

Our cloud experts helped NRG:

• Modernize their environment and document in SCM as IAC
• Reduce costs by leveraging AWS services to replace infrastructure services previously hosted as VMs
• Achieve cost efficiency and faster processes and deployment
• Gain ease of use and application management