Case Study: The Global Crop Diversity Trust achieves consolidated, scalable, secure cloud infrastructure and 30% cost savings with Amazon Web Services

The Global Crop Diversity Trust - Customer Case Study

The Global Crop Diversity Trust is an international nonprofit based in Bonn that funds and coordinates global seed and plant collections and maintains Genesys, a public database of more than 2.7 million crop varieties. Its IT estate had become fragmented—Genesys, several websites and internal systems were hosted across multiple providers—making management difficult, limiting the ability to scale the database, and creating cost and security concerns for a taxpayer-funded organization.

The Trust migrated to AWS, running Genesys on EC2 C3 instances behind an Elastic Load Balancer with MySQL on RDS, S3 for auxiliary data, Alfresco for 200,000 documents, consolidated customer sites to EC2, and adopted CloudWatch (with plans for CloudFront and CloudFormation). The move centralized management, enabled rapid capacity scaling and better performance, improved security and cost visibility via allocation tags, reduced operating expenses (about 30% expected savings), and provided ongoing AWS support.

The Global Crop Diversity Trust

Alireza Mohammadi

IT system administrator