The migration of customer portals into the cloud has many benefits for companies. The volatility of use means the benefits of a cloud structure can be completely exploited regarding performance and scalability. On the other hand, however, there are challenges in the fields of compliance and data protection. Storm Reply supports its customers in the migration of their corporate websites, including the customer portal, into the AWS cloud while adhering to strict, internal data protection requirements.
The sales channel of a large German energy company wanted to improve their online presence. At the same time, data protection played a central role. The objectives were, among other things, the improvement of the capability for online campaigns, more self-service elements for customers, faster order processing, improved customer experience and more interactivity for the users. The current IT landscape was not sufficient to meet the requirements since this could not ensure any volatile use, consistent delivery across all channels or high levels of availability. The customer chose the public cloud for reasons of scalability, security, flexibility and cost reduction. Storm Reply was responsible for the operation of all online applications on the basis of AWS.
Corporate data security intervened due to the personal data in the customer portal which, according to the federal data protection act (BDSG), is sensitive data and stored in the cache. The only way out was to encrypt sensitive data in the public cloud. The challenge was avoid limiting the non-functional requirements and to ensure the proportionality of the additional costs (in particular on the application side, since the application had already been developed).
A security solution was implemented that guarantees the encryption of the sensitive data in the cloud (vs. encryption of all data or the data medium). This did not require any changes to the application or the architecture. Only the sensitive data are – partially field based – encrypted (10-20% of the data traffic). Furthermore, there are no tangible performance losses. The solution can be used for all subsequent applications in the cloud. And in complete accordance with the “pay as you go” principle of the cloud, it is calculated by the hour.