Case Study: Kyowa Hakko Kirin achieves rapid cloud migration, greater agility, and cost savings with Amazon Web Services

Kyowa Hakko Kirin - Customer Case Study

Kyowa Hakko Kirin is a Tokyo-based pharmaceutical company (and parent to Kyowa Hakko Bio) that sells prescription drugs and pharmaceutical materials globally. With only about 20% of sales outside Japan and a goal to reach 40% by 2020, the company needed greater IT flexibility to respond quickly to new business demands and to modernize infrastructure while ensuring enterprise-grade security and integration with existing data centers.

Kyowa Hakko Kirin adopted AWS beginning in 2011, leveraging Amazon VPC, AWS Direct Connect, IAM and VPNs to create a private, hybrid cloud environment and migrate SAP and core systems like its Enterprise HUB. The move cut provisioning time and infrastructure costs, enabled rapid testing and consolidation (31 systems and 69 servers on AWS), and by September 2015 had moved about 40% of data to the cloud with the rest planned for migration; the company is now testing big-data services such as Amazon Redshift and EMR.

Kyowa Hakko Kirin

Toshiyuki Shinoda

Director, Information Systems Department