AWS Customer Spotlight: International Seaways
International Seaways, Inc. is one of the largest tanker companies worldwide providing energy transportation services for crude oil and petroleum products. Maintaining their position as a global leader in the volatile energy marketplace requires International Seaways to be as flexible, scalable and secure as possible. IT is critical to this process, which is why the tanker company hosts their entire IT infrastructure in the cloud and manages it through a variety of external providers.
The Challenges
It all started when a variety of Fortune 500 companies started getting hacked. Following a flurry of high-profile breaches of Amazon Web Services (AWS) clouds, International Seaways’ management urged IT to take a closer look into their own AWS environments. International Seaways used AWS for disaster recovery, data archiving and hosting a few non-critical applications.
As a small team with limited AWS-specific expertise, the International Seaways IT staff saw this as an opportunity to not only strengthen their cybersecurity posture, but to optimize it from top to bottom. One thing became clear: to sufficiently eliminate cybersecurity vulnerabilities, mitigate compliance risks, reduce spend and drive best practices going forward, they’d need help.
Challenges at a Glance
- Lack of in-house AWS expertise
- Lack of cloud monitoring/management capabilities and best practices
- Lack of visibility into spend and cost reduction opportunities
How We Helped
International Seaways was already a ConRes Managed Services customer for network monitoring, management and troubleshooting. This gave us the opportunity to make proactive recommendations for how to also better secure their AWS environment and optimize cloud spend. Armed with this fresh insight, International Seaways’ decision to extend their managed services engagement to the cloud was a no-brainer.
Following this shift, we immediately assessed their cloud security posture, identifying vulnerabilities and outlining remediation steps that would align their environment with best practices. We also onboarded them to our Managed Cloud Optimization service, which, in addition to managing ongoing security and compliance activities, also provided monitoring and cost analysis support. This service was crucial to International Seaways reducing their cloud spend and streamlining routine maintenance tasks.
Solutions at a Glance
- Assessed and identified security vulnerabilities and compliance risks
- Designed procedural remediation plan
- Onboarded them to Managed Cloud Optimization service
- Ongoing monitoring and best-practice guidance for cybersecurity, spend reduction, management and more
Results
With our support, International Seaways shored up their AWS security and reduced the cost and complexity of their entire environment. What’s more, our ongoing managed services role continues to help them make proactive, strategic use of their in-house resources, while ensuring cloud environment is always aligned with business goals, as well as AWS best practices.