GPSC Group Migrates Windows Workloads to AWS to Reduce Costs and Optimize Performance

A transition from coal-based to renewable energy has recently dominated policy agendas in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). In Thailand—a regional leader in renewables—the government has committed to generate 33 percent of the country’s total power through renewable sources by 2037. 

Global Power Synergy Public Company Ltd. (GPSC) Group is a flagship provider of sustainable energy in Thailand. It aspires to be among the top three power companies in Southeast Asia, with over half its revenue coming from green energy. GPSC acquired Glow Energy in 2020, combining to become GPSC Group and serve industrial customers such as petrochemical companies. 

GPSC was running on the cloud prior to the acquisition. But to further optimize value across operations and deliver more innovative services faster to customers, the group decided to migrate Glow Energy to the public cloud.

A strict 7-month timeline was set for the migration, to coincide with the finalization of the Glow Energy merger. GPSC Group selected Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its cloud provider due to the platform’s maturity and range of native technologies, especially solutions supporting data and analytics. AWS recommended AWS Partner DailiTech to aid the migration and implementation, given their proven expertise and capabilities in large-scale migration.

DailiTech, alongside AWS, worked closely with the newly created GPSC Group to train their teams in running enterprise operations on the cloud. After decades operating within a legacy data center environment, they valued the expertise and knowledge gained throughout the migration process.

“DailiTech is highly experienced with AWS and continually advises us on how to adopt cloud best practices and the many services we can use to improve our business,” says Pongthep Muangkaew, digital platforms division manager at GPSC Group.

GPSC Group established an AWS Landing Zone for a secure, multi-account environment. The AWS Professional Services team was instrumental in advising on security configurations for an energy enterprise such as GPSC Group with many Windows-based workloads. The group is using Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances to run Windows on virtual machines, with segregation of resources and cloud-native access controls to prevent intrusions.

GPSC Group is also using Amazon CloudWatch and AWS CloudTrail to monitor applications and track user activity. “We previously needed to strictly monitor our resources and user access on premises, but now we are confident that our systems on AWS can safely autoscale and detect any anomalies for quick resolution,” Pongthep says. Security has also improved thanks to automatic Windows updates on AWS. In the past, updates were performed manually, increasing the chance of error or downtime if they fell behind schedule.

Most of the the group’s applications were moved to the AWS Cloud using AWS Application Migration Service, but certain Windows 2003 workloads presented a challenge. Configuration conflicts with rebooting affected Glow Energy’s legacy Windows applications and required workarounds to migrate successfully. DailiTech’s experience, enhanced by collaborative team efforts, helped resolve the issue. 

“GPSC teams, AWS Professional Services and solution architects, and DailiTech collaborated throughout this process to find a solution to a complex challenge involving Windows versioning updates,” Pongthep says. DailiTech used Amazon WorkSpaces to port to GPSC Group’s VPC and migrate 150 Tier 1 Windows applications to the AWS Cloud. Remote capabilities contributed to faster application access and data retrieval between the AWS Cloud and GPSC Group’s existing on-premises infrastructure.

Per its initial goals for cloud migration, GPSC Group has optimized operations. Some Windows applications are running up to 20 percent faster on AWS, and users no longer complain about lags when logging in. When keying in work orders at the plant—a daily task for various GPSC Group teams—employees used to wait 10–20 seconds for screens to load. With Windows on AWS, loading times are down to just 1–3 seconds. 

Pongthep attributes the increase in speed, at least in part, to the newer generation hardware powering AWS instances. In the company’s legacy environment, hardware was aging and would have required a complete refresh to come close to the performance levels experienced from the outset on the cloud. “With AWS, we invest only in the operations cost and not the replacement cost of hardware. We can also continually optimize our application costing due to higher visibility into actual memory and compute requirements for each workload,” Pongthep adds.

Cost savings are a primary benefit of the group’s AWS Cloud migration. GPSC Group is saving 20–25 percent on hardware, software, and licensing since migrating from the data center. These figures don’t take productivity savings into account, either. While the exact time savings are hard to estimate, Pongthep and the team now have less maintenance work related to servers and can spend time on value-added projects.

GPSC Group is now exploring data and analytics possibilities on AWS, including the creation of a data warehouse to help with predictive maintenance at plants. The group is actively planning its expansion into Malaysia, India, Taiwan, and Singapore, and views the AWS Cloud as a driver of growth.

“Migration to AWS has allowed us to pursue operational excellence and future innovation with access to services that go beyond the footprint of on-premises infrastructure. We can create value for new and existing stakeholders by delivering reliable, environmentally friendly products,” says Pongthep.