Covanta
We converted waste to energy for one million homes.
An Overview
The Challenge
Covanta’s aggressive growth and acquisitions were straining its IT department and hampering its ability to quickly integrate new employees. They wanted to reduce overhead by migrating to AWS.
The Solution
2nd Watch and AWS helped Covanta migrate 400 servers and 43 business apps to AWS, enabling them to deliver services to users 90% faster and save more than 60% on IT infrastructure costs.
The Outcome
Today, Covanta is delivering services to users 90% faster and expects to save more than 60% in IT infrastructure costs once fully deployed on AWS.
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About the Company
Covanta is a global provider of sustainable waste and energy solutions with 45 facilities worldwide. Every year, Covanta’s facilities safely convert approximately 20 million tons of waste into clean, renewable electricity to power one million homes and recycle approximately 500,000 tons of metal.
02
The Business Challenges & 2nd Watch Solution
Covanta has grown aggressively through acquisition since 2010, resulting in strains on its IT department and hampering the organization’s ability to quickly integrate employees from acquired companies. Procuring, configuring, and deploying new applications took weeks or even months. In 2015, Covanta chose to work with AWS in order to reduce its overhead, and selected 2nd Watch to lead the AWS migration.
2nd Watch & AWS Professional Services performed a cloud readiness assessment of Covanta’s application portfolio and designed the optimal AWS architecture utilizing the Well-Architected Framework to support Covanta’s business. AWS services used include Amazon EC2, AWS Elastic Load Balancing, Auto Scaling, Amazon S3, and Glacier for data archiving backup. 2nd Watch also recommended Amazon Workspaces to provide instant, secure access to Covanta’s business applications for employees of an acquired company. 2nd Watch will also deliver long-term support and optimization of Covanta’s AWS infrastructure through its Managed Cloud Services program. By end of summer 2017, 2nd Watch and AWS will have migrated more than 400 servers and 43 business applications from Covanta’s internal datacenter to AWS as part of a long-term initiative to outsource Covanta’s IT infrastructure to the cloud to support smooth onboarding of acquired companies and lower operating expenses.
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The Business Benefits
Today, Covanta is delivering services to users 90% faster and expects to save more than 60% in IT infrastructure costs once fully deployed on AWS. “We are now much more efficient, and the time that we used to spend managing the internal data center is now being spent supporting our business mission of sustainability,” says Odalis Tejada, Covanta’s associate director for network services data center operations.
“2nd Watch has been a wonderful partner in helping us plan appropriately for the migration and maintain productivity while on our journey to the cloud.”
