AWS re:Invent 2025 - Koch Industries' data migration success with AWS Countdown Premium (SPS316)

AWS re:Invent 2025 - Koch Industries' Data Migration Success with AWS Countdown Premium

Overview

• This session presented a case study on how Koch Industries' subsidiary, Transaction Network Services (TNS), modernized their mission-critical call authentication platform by migrating to AWS.
• The presentation covered the business challenges of spam and fraud calls, the technical architecture of TNS's call guardian platform, and the lessons learned from their cloud migration and modernization journey.
• The session also introduced AWS Countdown Premium, a technical guidance service to help customers accelerate their cloud migration and modernization efforts.

The Challenge of Spam and Fraud Calls

• Spam and fraud calls have become a major problem for both consumers and businesses, eroding trust in the telecommunications ecosystem.
• 68% of contact center executives say spam/fraud calls have hurt their bottom line, and 88% know someone who has been affected by call spoofing.
• 96% of companies are seeking authentication and anti-spoofing solutions to address this issue.

TNS Call Guardian Platform

• TNS operates a platform called Call Guardian that processes billions of call events per day to identify and mitigate spam and fraud calls.
• The platform uses cross-carrier data, network analytics, and behavioral indicators to assess the risk of each call in real-time (within tens of milliseconds).
• This allows the platform to label calls as "safe", "warning", or "block" before they reach the end user's device.
• The platform supports over 120 million subscribers and 150 carriers, protecting 19 billion calls from spam/fraud in the last 12 months.

Migrating to the AWS Cloud

• To support the scale and performance requirements of the Call Guardian platform, TNS migrated from an on-premises solution to the AWS cloud.
• Key architectural components include:
  • Amazon EMR and EBS for low-latency processing of real-time call events
  • Apache Hive, Spark, and Druid for large-scale analytics and reporting
  • Amazon SageMaker for model training and A/B testing
  • AWS Data Lake for centralized data governance and security
• The migration provided benefits such as improved scalability, cost optimization, observability, and faster time-to-market for new features.

Lessons Learned

• Cost optimization is an ongoing challenge, as the initial lift-and-shift migration may not immediately reduce costs compared to on-premises.
• Failover and disaster recovery testing is more complex in the cloud, requiring tools like AWS FIS (Fault Injection Service) to simulate failure scenarios.
• Organizational change management is critical, as cloud adoption impacts people, processes, and tooling across the organization.
• Close collaboration with AWS support teams is valuable to stay up-to-date on the latest cloud service enhancements.

Next Steps

• TNS plans to further optimize costs through autoscaling, containerization, and serverless architectures.
• Improving observability and security posture using AWS services like Amazon Kendra and Amazon Sentinel.
• Continuing to innovate on the Call Guardian platform, leveraging the agility and scalability of the AWS cloud.

AWS Countdown Premium

• AWS Countdown Premium is a technical guidance service to help customers accelerate their cloud migration and modernization journeys.
• It provides a dedicated AWS engineer to work embedded with the customer team, along with templates, runbooks, and tooling to guide the process.
• The service covers use cases like data migrations, application modernization, and large-scale machine learning workloads.
• Countdown Premium is integrated with the new AWS Transform service, allowing customers to access guidance directly within their workflow.

Key Takeaways

• Migrating mission-critical platforms to the cloud can provide significant benefits in scalability, cost optimization, and innovation, but also introduces new challenges.
• Close collaboration with AWS support teams and leveraging specialized services like Countdown Premium can ease the transition and accelerate the cloud modernization journey.
• Organizational change management and aligning people, processes, and technology are critical for successful cloud adoption.
• Innovative platforms like TNS's Call Guardian demonstrate how the cloud can enable real-world solutions to complex, global problems.