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Migrating a Leading Telecom’s Micropayment Platform to AWS
About the client
Andersen’s customer is a leading telecommunications company and a key player in its country’s digital ecosystem. Founded in the 1990s, the organization grew from an early mobile communications provider into a nationwide operator delivering mobile connectivity, internet access, and digital services.
The company serves both consumer and enterprise customers, offering mobile connectivity, data services, international communication, and an expanding portfolio of digital solutions. As part of its strategic development, the customer continues to invest in modernization initiatives, digital platforms, and emerging technologies to improve service quality, operational efficiency, and customer experience.
Business Context
As the customer expanded its digital offerings, the on-premises infrastructure supporting its payment platform began to limit business agility. Scalability constraints, high operational maintenance costs, and limited disaster recovery capabilities created growing risks for a revenue-generating system.
To maintain service reliability and create a foundation for future growth, the customer initiated a strategic migration of the payment platform to AWS. The goal of this cloud migration for Telecom was not merely to perform a lift-and-shift migration, but to establish a modern, resilient, and cost-controlled cloud environment.
Challenges
Migrating a production platform with direct revenue impact required a carefully controlled, low-risk approach. This Telecom cloud migration project presented several critical challenges:
- Infrastructure access and connectivity. Establishing secure, high-bandwidth connectivity between the on-premises data center and AWS was the first technical hurdle and required careful network configuration;
- Legacy system discovery. A comprehensive discovery phase was required to analyze the legacy system architecture, dependencies, and data flows, ensuring that all components were identified and migration risks were minimized;
- Re-platforming complexity. The decision to re-platform selected legacy components introduced additional architectural complexity and required detailed dependency analysis to ensure seamless integration with modernized services;
- Data consistency and zero downtime. Maintaining strict data consistency between on-premises and cloud environments during the cutover phase was mission-critical. Any disruption to the payment platform’s availability could directly impact customer transactions and revenue.
Project overview
The AWS migration and disaster recovery implementation project was structured as a full-scale production migration with a clear objective: move the existing payment platform to a cloud environment to reduce operational risk, improve scalability, and establish long-term cost transparency.
The project addressed key business limitations of the on-premises infrastructure, including limited scalability, high operational effort, disaster recovery gaps, and a lack of granular cost visibility.
The engagement was delivered in three structured phases:
- Discovery and assessment. The Andersen team conducted an in-depth analysis of the payment platform to define the migration scope, assess infrastructure dependencies, and provide data-driven recommendations for cloud optimization;
- Secure migration. The platform was migrated to AWS with minimal downtime, ensuring business continuity and validating that critical workloads could be moved safely and efficiently;
- Modernization and DR implementation. Selected components were modernized to improve performance and availability. A comprehensive disaster recovery strategy was implemented, enabling fast recovery times and strengthening business continuity for this revenue-generating platform.
About the project
Solution
The Andersen team executed a phased strategy for cloud migration for Telecom, establishing a secure and scalable cloud foundation for the payment platform while ensuring uninterrupted business operations.
Hybrid connectivity foundation
- Reliable connectivity was established using Site-to-Site VPN tunnels and AWS Direct Connect to provide dedicated, low-latency network performance.
- An AWS Virtual Private Gateway ensured secure and redundant routing between the customer’s on-premises infrastructure and AWS.
- Amazon Route 53 was configured with both public and private hosted zones to enable intelligent DNS routing and seamless name resolution across hybrid environments.
Phased migration execution
- Workload migration. AWS Application Migration Service (MGN) replicated on-premises workloads to AWS with minimal production impact.
- Database replication. AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) enabled continuous data synchronization, maintaining data consistency during the cutover phase.
- Compute and container orchestration. Application components were deployed on Amazon EC2, while containerized workloads were orchestrated using Amazon ECS. AWS Cloud Map enabled dynamic service discovery, allowing microservices to locate each other efficiently. Application Load Balancer (ALB) distributed incoming traffic across containers to ensure high availability and fault tolerance.
Platform modernization
- Database. Legacy databases were migrated to Amazon Aurora (Amazon RDS), providing automated backups, Multi-AZ deployment, and improved performance.
- Caching and messaging. Amazon ElastiCache reduced database load, while Amazon MQ ensured reliable communication between distributed services.
- Storage. Amazon EFS provided scalable shared file storage for containerized applications.
Disaster recovery and security
- AWS Backup centralized and automated backup policies across services, supporting clearly defined recovery objectives (RPO/RTO).
- Amazon CloudFront accelerated content delivery through global edge locations.
- Security groups, private subnets, and network ACLs provided defense-in-depth security.
The result was a production-ready cloud environment with automated orchestration, robust disaster recovery capabilities, and a clear path for future platform innovation.
Project results
The successful production migration delivered measurable value to the customer:
- Enhanced cost transparency. The migration delivered a 34% reduction in Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) compared to the legacy on-premises setup, along with clear, tag-based cost visibility per service and data-driven recommendations for ongoing optimization;
- Risk-free validation. The AWS staging environment enabled safe validation of real workloads prior to go-live, delivering a predictable cutover completed in under 12 hours with zero business disruption;
- Improved performance and resilience. Through targeted re-platforming, the payment platform now benefits from a 40% improvement in transaction throughput and reduced latency delivered by native AWS services;
- Strengthened business continuity. The implemented disaster recovery capabilities reduced RTO from 24 hours to under 30 minutes and RPO from 24 hours to under 15 minutes, protecting a critical revenue-generating service;
- Operational efficiency. Automation and managed services eliminated approximately 60% of the manual operational overhead previously required for infrastructure management, freeing the customer’s engineering team for higher-value work;
- A strategic blueprint. This cloud migration project established a proven reference architecture for the transformation of other products within the customer’s ecosystem, enabling the customer to project a 50% faster time-to-market for future migrations and improved cost control across the organization.
Additional info
Key deployment activities and services included in this cloud migration for Telecom project were:
- Three-phase approach — Discovery, Migration, and Modernization — each with clearly defined deliverables;
- Key AWS services utilized: AWS Application Migration Service (MGN), Amazon Aurora (RDS), Amazon ECS, AWS Direct Connect, Amazon ElastiCache, Application Load Balancer (ALB), Amazon Route 53, AWS Cloud Map, Amazon MQ, Amazon EFS, Amazon CloudFront, AWS Backup, Amazon EC2, and VPN;
- Infrastructure outcomes include secure networking, automated orchestration, and a production-ready cloud environment;
- Final deliverables include a validated architecture, a modernized cloud-native platform, and a fully implemented disaster recovery strategy.
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