National Solar Energy Group migrates critical systems from AWS to OCI

Launched in 2009, National Solar Energy Group (NSEG) is Australia’s largest integrated solar company. It has installed over 80,000 solar energy systems at homes, businesses, and government buildings.

Demand for renewable energy is soaring around the globe. The International Energy Agency expects it to account for almost 95% of the increase in global power capacity by 2026. With continued growth expected, NSEG questioned the flexibility of its critical systems to support increasing workloads. Meanwhile, a malicious attack on the on-premises Solar customer relationship management (CRM) system impacted more than 300 employees for 8 to 10 hours, raising concerns over security.

To provide a more scalable and secure platform for the CRM’s MySQL database, the company turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the Amazon Relational Database Service. Yet NSEG quickly realized after its AWS bills started increasing rapidly that the company would need to seek an alternative.

After NSEG looked at other leading cloud service providers, it selected Oracle MySQL HeatWave and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). The MySQL service provided the security, scalability, and stability NSEG needed, along with a more cost-effective, pay-as-you-go model. In addition, compared to AWS and other cloud providers, OCI’s flexible Infrastructure E4 and X9 platforms offer the latest generation of AMD and Intel processors, featuring a flexible CPU and memory ratio and better price-performance.

Given the criticality of its systems, NSEG decided to work with Oracle Cloud Lift Services on the initial migration of 12 websites and the Solar CRM application. As part of its work, Lift Services supported the setup of the OCI tenancy, finalized the network architecture, and migrated the websites and application.

NSEG’s decision to migrate from AWS to OCI resulted in cost savings of 35% compared to its previous bills. From day one, the performance of its Solar CRM and other business-critical applications on OCI has been consistently high with zero downtime, leaving more than 300  employees who were affected by the CRM outage highly satisfied.

To ensure a smooth transition, Oracle Cloud Lift Services provided go-live support when the Solar CRM production environment migrated from AWS to OCI. So far, it has helped fine-tune the database and application for superior performance along with migrating more workloads to OCI.

NSEG is following cloud best practices, using Oracle Cloud Guard to help bolster its cloud security posture and monitoring. This in turn reduced the pressure on the NSEG IT team, which now has more time to focus on service improvements and innovation.

In the future, the IT team is looking to move its disaster recovery infrastructure to OCI. This will form part of a broader plan to continue reducing IT costs and improving efficiencies as the demands on IT grow in line with rapid business growth over the coming years.