Seamless Windchill migration to AWS Cloud

The challenge

The client, a leading provider of industrial automation and electrification technologies in Central Europe, has over 100,000 employees and is dedicated to driving innovations that accelerate industrial transformations. The client was using Windchill as their enterprise PLM system, hosted on PTC Cloud and encountered several challenges:

Restricted access to the underlying IAM configurations of the SaaS hosted solution
Difficulty enforcing organization-wide security policies or monitoring user activity in real time
Delayed access for new users due to administrative and logistical challenges
Limited access to detailed logs or integration with SIEM tools and difficulty in meeting compliance requirements
A lack of transparency regarding the underlying infrastructure, performance metrics and operational procedures, making it challenging to access system health, performance and security details, which impacted decision-making, issue forecasting and capacity planning
No proven geographical resiliency for the Windchill application

The objective

The client aimed to migrate Windchill from the PTC Cloud to AWS while addressing critical security and identity management challenges. The key objectives were:

Gain complete visibility, access and control over IAM configuration, infrastructure, operational procedures, system management and application logs and configurations
Achieve compliance requirements with complete access to application logs and integration to SIEM tools
Design a highly available and geographically resilient architecture for the Windchill application, considering its large user base and critical operations

The solution

HCLTech developed and executed a comprehensive migration strategy to transition the Windchill application from PTC Cloud to AWS Cloud, focusing on improved control, performance and availability. Key steps included:

Identity and access management: Centralized authentication and authorization using AWS IAM with granular policies and role-based access, ensuring only authorized users can access PLM and related systems
Network security: Designed an Amazon VPC with private subnets, security groups and NACLs to isolate workloads and enforce least privilege access
Data protection: Implemented AWS KMS for encryption of data at rest and in transit, ensuring sensitive product information remained secure
Monitoring and compliance: Used Amazon CloudWatch for monitoring and AWS CloudTrail for logging all API activity, providing complete visibility and auditability
Resilience and disaster recovery: Implemented backup and restore strategies using AWS Backup, enabling compliance with RPO requirements
Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Automated infrastructure provisioning with AWS CloudFormation, reducing human error and ensuring consistent security configurations across environments

The impact

Complete control over identity and access management, quick rollout of organization-wide policies, quick user onboarding, monitor user access, centralized IAM policies
Achieved 20% cost savings while maintaining high application availability and performance
Delivered a highly available and geographically resilient architecture for Windchill on AWS, ensuring business continuity
The client gained complete control and transparency over operations and infrastructure, eliminating the challenges of limited visibility
AWS provided a scalable and flexible infrastructure, enabling the client to meet growing business demands effectively

AWS services used:

Amazon EC2
Amazon S3
Amazon EBS
Amazon RDS
AWS Datasync
Amazon CloudWatch
Amazon VPC
AWS Backup
AWS IAM
AWS CloudFormation
AWS Systems Manager