Services: Cloud
Client Overview
World Kinect Corporation is a prominent energy management firm with a vast customer base spanning over 200 countries, offering a comprehensive suite of energy advisory, management, and fulfillment services.
The Challenge
Eliminating Technical Debt and Enabling Scalable Growth in a Mission-Critical IT Landscape
As a global leader in energy logistics and management, World Kinect Corporation operated in a high-stakes, real-time environment where system uptime, data integrity, and scalability were mission-critical. However, much of the organization’s core IT infrastructure, including its Oracle E-Business Suite and middleware stack, was running on aging, unsupported Solaris systems. This legacy environment introduced significant operational and compliance risks, including exposure to security vulnerabilities, difficulty in supporting modernization initiatives, and rising infrastructure maintenance costs.
In addition, the company faced challenges in optimizing its testing and development environments, which lacked the elasticity needed to efficiently support agile delivery models. The need to modernize was clear: World Kinect required a future-ready IT backbone that could provide operational resilience, improve performance, and reduce cost, without compromising business continuity during the migration. A holistic modernization strategy was essential to upgrade legacy applications, re-platform core systems, and successfully migrate critical workloads to the cloud.
Sutherland Solution
A Structured, Three-Phase Digital Transformation with Secure AWS Cloud Migration at the Core
Sutherland designed and executed a comprehensive three-phase transformation roadmap, bringing together deep Oracle expertise, cloud engineering capabilities, and a risk-mitigated migration strategy tailored to World Kinect’s operational complexity.
Phase 1 – Re-Platforming and Stabilization
The first phase focused on moving away from aging Solaris-based systems to a modern, stable, and cost-efficient platform. Sutherland re-platformed World Kinect’s Oracle E-Business Suite and supporting middleware from proprietary UNIX to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).
This transition standardized environments, eliminated hardware dependencies, and established a predictable performance baseline ahead of migration. The team implemented continuous monitoring using Amazon CloudWatch and AWS Systems Manager to stabilize operations and fine-tune configurations. Backup and compliance processes were enhanced with AWS Backup and AWS Key Management Service (KMS), ensuring data integrity and encryption consistency across all environments.
Phase 2 – Application Modernization and Code Refactoring
With a stable foundation in place, Sutherland modernized and optimized Oracle workloads to prepare them for cloud deployment. Application tiers were upgraded from Oracle EBS 11.5.10.2 to EBS 12.2.9, and database instances from Oracle 11g to 19c, introducing performance and compatibility improvements.
Code refactoring efforts focused on decoupling integrations, optimizing PL/SQL packages, and modularizing middleware services to leverage AWS-native automation later in the journey. Security posture was strengthened through AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) and AWS Secrets Manager, while AWS CloudTrail provided traceability across all modernization activities. These enhancements ensured the environment was cloud-ready, scalable, and aligned with AWS Well-Architected best practices.
Phase 3 – Lift-and-Shift Migration to AWS Cloud
In the final phase, Sutherland executed the full-scale migration of Oracle workloads to AWS, applying a lift-and-shift strategy optimized for speed and reliability. Core Oracle EBS applications were deployed on Amazon EC2 instances, with Amazon EBS providing high-performance storage and Amazon EFS supporting shared file systems for multi-tiered applications.
Data archival and backup pipelines were built on Amazon S3, integrated with lifecycle policies for cost optimization. Network connectivity was established via AWS Direct Connect and Site-to-Site VPN, ensuring secure hybrid operations during cutover.
To automate wave deployments and validations, Sutherland leveraged AWS Step Functions and AWS Lambda, while Amazon GuardDuty, AWS WAF, and AWS Shield Advanced provided layered security. After migration, Sutherland optimized resource utilization using AWS Compute Optimizer and AWS Cost Explorer, realizing immediate cost and performance gains.
The Outcome
The migration and modernization initiative delivered significant business and operational improvements across World Kinect’s global operations. By moving its Oracle workloads from aging Solaris infrastructure to the AWS Cloud, the company realized annual cost savings of approximately $2.7 million, driven by the decommissioning of legacy hardware, reduced licensing overhead, and optimized resource utilization.
Application performance improved by 20 percent, with faster transaction processing and enhanced stability in the replatformed Oracle E-Business Suite environment. The modernization also enabled the consolidation of 22 global data centers into a unified cloud architecture, simplifying operations and reducing the complexity of managing geographically distributed systems.
Collectively, these outcomes transformed World Kinect’s IT landscape into a resilient, secure, and scalable environment capable of supporting its evolving business strategy. The success of this program positioned the organization to innovate rapidly, maintain compliance globally, and continue advancing its sustainability and digital operations goals with AWS as its strategic cloud foundation.
AWS Resources at play:
- R5b Memory Optimized Instances for Large DB workloads
- RAID on Io2 Block Express Volumes to achieve 200K+ IOPS
- Custom Lambda Functions to clone Prod to Dev Environment
- AWS Cloud Formation Templates + Ansible for Oracle Application & DB deployments
- AWS SSM – For secure remote session management
- AWS EFS for common storage for App High Availability
- AWS GuardDuty, CloudWatch & Inspector for Observation & Security
About Sutherland
Sutherland having deep expertise in digital transformation and business process services company specializing in cloud engineering, automation, artificial intelligence, and advanced analytics was able to deliver this project leveraging its automation platforms, AWS core skills, migration runbooks.
KEY OUTCOMES
In cost savings
Improvement in system performance
