Just 20 percent into their AWS
migration, TransCanada is starting to
see the forecasted benefits and
reinvesting financial capital into new
programs. The company’s Director of
IT Operations & Infrastructure shares
how they are making it happen.
For more than 65 years, TransCanada has proudly delivered the energy that
millions of North Americans rely on to power their lives and fuel industry. We
are leaders in the safe and reliable operation of pipelines, storage facilities and
power-generating stations across Canada, the U.S. and Mexico.
In the energy business, we are committed to supporting long-term strategies
but always need to be ready to react quickly to immediate business needs. For
TransCanada, that means planning and building relationships in communities
that last decades. At the same time, we need to think in the moment to react to
short-term business conditions influenced by everything from weather to pol-
itics to usage patterns.
Our move from data centers to cloud provides an interesting look at this short-
plus long-term approach. The project began as a data center consolidation plan
– not leveraging the cloud for re-hosting. Over the years, we have accumulated
significant data center capacity from company growth through acquisition. So
the long-term plan was to reduce our data center footprint and cut costs.
In the process of studying the issue, we looked at ways to offload a small per-
centage of workloads to the cloud. The cloud benefits were compelling and
soon we were modeling out more intensive cloud scenarios and ultimately
decided to go almost all in. Today, we are shrinking our data center use down
to a bare minimum for real-time systems only and moving all other workloads
to the public cloud.
In other words, we made a quick-turn decision to change the course of a long-
term plan. We are still cutting costs and promoting efficiencies, as we planned
early on in our data center consolidation initiative. But now we are adding
additional long-term benefits: better security, more scalability, increased reli-
ability for all systems and a newfound ability to apply analytics to a wide range
of business operations.
FALL 2018 | THE DOPPLER | 7