TC Energy goes all-in on AWS

TC Energy is going all-in on the cloud, moving its entire infrastructure to AWS. The North American energy company, headquartered in Canada, has migrated almost 90 percent of its corporate and commercial applications, including its SAP platform, to AWS. TC Energy is leveraging the breadth and depth of AWS services, including machine learning, analytics, database, serverless, storage, and compute to deliver energy and generate power more efficiently for millions of homes in North America. The migration also positioned TC Energy to respond quickly to the evolving COVID-19 situation, with TC Energy employees using Amazon WorkSpaces virtual desktops remotely – which extend the functionality of in-office software resources to at-home users – to work securely from home.

In 2017, TC Energy began migrating workloads to AWS to modernise its infrastructure and improve operational efficiencies. A year later, the company decided to go all-in, moving all of its business-critical applications, including its SAP platform, to AWS. The TC Energy team carefully planned and architected the migration, ultimately moving its entire SAP platform to AWS with zero downtime and no impact on operations. The company reports a 30 percent decrease in overall costs related to its SAP workloads since migrating to AWS. As part of the overall infrastructure migration, TC Energy also focused on optimisation, using AWS Reserved Instances and Savings Plans to drive efficiency in its cloud computing usage and capacity planning. With AWS’s Instance Scheduler tool (a solution that enables customers to easily configure custom start and stop schedules for their Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud and Amazon Relational Database Service instances), TC Energy takes advantage of the elasticity of the cloud to scale down capacity at night, turning off its workloads unrelated to energy production. By going all-in on AWS, TC Energy was able to achieve significant savings that the company is redirecting into further investments in research, development, and innovation, including new machine learning projects.

“Since moving to AWS, we’ve shifted our focus to automating workflows and unlocking efficiencies, rather than operating infrastructure and managing costly and complex upgrades,” said Chris Foster, Vice President, Information Services and Chief Information Officer of TC Energy. “The visibility we now have across our business has helped us to drive efficiency in our operations and explore new solutions to advance our efforts on environmental stewardship to reduce our impact on land disturbance, carbon intensity, and energy consumption. Our teams identify business hurdles and work with Information Services to develop new cloud-native applications in a way that just wasn’t possible before we started running on AWS.”

“TC Energy is a prime example of how the cloud contributes to changing the way a company does business, enabling innovation to permeate deep into its culture and operations,” said Mike Clayville, Vice President, Worldwide Commercial Sales at AWS. “By going-all in on AWS, the company is innovating at a faster clip and unlocking insights that are helping to improve the operational efficiency of energy delivery, as well as enhancing its conservation and sustainability practices. They’re finding ways to boost capacity and changing the way they approach business issues. TC Energy is an example of how organisations today can use the power of the cloud to transform their business.”