Key Links is a Hong Kong-based company that offers intelligent Internet of Things (IoT) solutions for homes, hotels, and workspaces to improve the quality and comfort levels across living and business environments. The company’s solutions focus on various domains, including lighting, temperature, audio systems, security, and pet monitoring. It aims to deliver benefits in terms of energy savings and comfortable living environments that customers can adjust based on personal preferences and secure homes or workplaces with next-gen IoT security solutions.

Key Links has been renting on-premises servers to deploy and maintain business applications and services. With rapid business growth, the company’s compute, storage, and networking requirements have increased more than ever. Hence, the company required to rent more servers which consequently increased the daily workload for its personnel to manage and maintain a large number of servers.

Key Links wanted to overcome these challenges by transitioning its IT infrastructure to a cloud model that helps lower operational expenditure and improve the effectiveness of its IT team.

Alibaba Cloud is the leading cloud provider in Hong Kong with numerous world-class availability zones. Alibaba Cloud provides more than 200 cloud services and offers flexible billing models to help businesses uncover productivity improvements, find cost optimization opportunities, and deliver high-performing applications. Moreover, Alibaba Cloud provides dynamic scaling capabilities to automatically provision and de-provision cloud resources based on workload requirements. Key Links wanted to tap into these capabilities to overcome its business challenges and chose Alibaba Cloud as its cloud partner.

Key Links' primary pain point is that many users had to access its services or applications from Mainland China via servers located in Hong Kong. This was disrupting user access and impacting experience. It used Alibaba Cloud's Premium EIP, an optional solution, to help users in the Mainland China ecosystem seamlessly tap into its services by directly accessing Hong Kong servers with high speed and secure connectivity.

Key Links utilized VPN Gateway to connect on-premises infrastructure with its cloud environment to facilitate infrastructure transition and seamlessly redeploy applications to the cloud from on-premises infrastructure. Key Links leveraged Elastic Compute Service (ECS) to host and run business applications and other computing workloads. It utilized Object Storage Service (OSS) to store large amounts of data efficiently. ECS and OSS helped the company to scale dynamically and manage costs more efficiently

It also unified security management using Security Center to identify security threats in real-time and mitigate them. It leveraged Cloud Firewall to set policies, safeguard its network, and control the traffic originating from the internet. It also used Web Application Firewall (WAF) service to identify and mitigate real-time threats, such as malicious traffic, from end-user-facing interfaces.

On top of all this, Key Links reduced its infrastructure and operational costs by leveraging Alibaba Cloud's flexible billing models and payment methods.

Keys Links aims to transition to Alibaba Cloud from its on-premises infrastructure completely. After this transition, the company wants to explore data analytics products, such as DataV and Quick BI, to uncover more meaningful insights from its data sets. Such intelligent products will help deliver invaluable IoT customization experiences and top-notch security to its customers. Moreover, Key Links is delighted that Alibaba Cloud has been the cloud partner it needed to overcome business challenges.