CYNCLAIR: Driving Modernization and Cost Efficiency Through AWS Migration

 

About CYNCLAIR

CYNCLAIR is a leading Thai-owned cybersecurity company serving organizations across Thailand, Myanmar, and Singapore. As a trusted global provider of managed detection and response (MDR) services, CYNCLAIR helps clients stay ahead of cybercrime with cutting-edge technology, robust security measures, and expert support.

The company recently launched AZURITES OpenXDR, Thailand’s own extended detection and response (XDR) platform built to global standards. AZURITES OpenXDR empowers organizations with advanced threat detection and incident response capabilities at a cost-effective price point.

To accelerate innovation and reduce operational overhead, CYNCLAIR decided to migrate its applications and infrastructure to the AWS Cloud, aiming to minimize on-premises data center costs, reduce software licensing fees, and optimize platform utilization.

Challenges

CYNCLAIR faced several challenges with its legacy on-premises infrastructure:

  • High Costs: Maintaining on premise infrastructure required significant capital investment.
  • Limited Flexibility: On-premises systems could not easily scale to meet seasonal or evolving business needs.
  • Security Gaps: Growing demand for centralized security and compliance monitoring across workloads.

Solutions

To address these challenges, CYNCLAIR partnered with MSC’s certified AWS cloud experts to design and implement a comprehensive migration and modernization plan.

Key steps included:

  • AWS Landing Zone Design: Establishing a secure, well-architected foundation for migration.
  • Database Modernization: Using AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) to Migrated enterprise data to Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL and replaced the legacy ELK stack with Amazon OpenSearch Service, reducing licensing and management overhead.
  • Application Modernization: Refactored and containerized critical applications, deploying them on Amazon EKS for auto-scaling, multi-AZ high availability, and simplified operations.
  • Enhanced Security: Adopting AWS best practices with tools such as Amazon GuardDuty, AWS Config, and centralized logging for improved threat detection and compliance.

Benefits

By migrating to AWS Thailand Region, CYNCLAIR achieved significant business outcomes: scale our business efficiently, reduce costs, and enhance data security.

CYNCLAIR Migrate/Modernize to AWS to reduce data center footprint on-premises to save operational cost

The CYNCLAIR’s custom – applications currently using Jenkins for CI/CD to build and running on premises and Docker image is being stored in Artifact repository.
Key Challenges and Complications:

  • CYNCLAIR faced significant risks due to potential hardware and network failures in their existing infrastructure.
  • Huge capital investment for continuing Enterprise License Agreement of VMWare (ELA), which will be expired soon, as well as hardware and maintenance investment.

CYNCLAIR want to migrate/modernize approach to overcome these challenges, looking to design well architecture for the virtual branch application and corporate internal application and designing time-effective migration starting with a detail assessment of their existing environment was an issues.

Eliminating Security Concerns

Aside from cost control, CYNCLAIR looked to strengthen its security posture on the AWS Cloud and Improve security operations visibility, centralize threat detection for AWS container workloads. To prevent such attacks in its AWS Cloud environment, the business implemented AWS security best practice to meet security and compliance requirements.

The Migration and Modernization of Applications

MSC’s team of certified cloud expert assessed CYNCLAIR existing environment and designed a complete migration plan for Application. It covers design and implementation of AWS Landing zone, security, and platform modernization.

We formulated a migration strategy for re-platform and re-host the application and running them optimally in the AWS environment. Following was the approach adhered to for achieving CYNCLAIR’s said objectives.

  • Re-Factor application into containers on Amazon EKS, enabling horizontal auto-scaling and multi-AZ resilience.
  • Re-platforming databases and analytics to Amazon RDS and replace the ELK stack with Amazon OpenSearch Service, reducing licensing cost, improving scalability, and minimizing operational effort.
  • Utilization of various AWS services such as EC2, EKS, RDS, OpenSearch, among others, for various aspects of the migration.
  • Used cloud native security to enhanced through measures like adopting the CIS Baseline for compliance, using Amazon GuardDuty for threat detection, and centralizing logging and threat detection mechanisms.

Tech Stack

  • Amazon EC2
  • Amazon EKS
  • Amazon OpenSearch Service
  • Amazon RDS
  • Amazon GuardDuty
  • AWS Config
  • Amazon CloudWatch
  • AWS CloudTrail
  • Amazon VPC
  • Amazon Elastic Load Balancing
  • Amazon CloudFront
  • Amazon Control Tower
  • AWS BACKUP
  • AWS S3