Overview

The Electricity & Water Authority (EWA) is Bahrain's government body responsible for the generation, transmission, and distribution of electricity and water across the Kingdom. EWA's GIS platform is a mission-critical system supporting infrastructure mapping, field operations, and asset management. Facing an aging on-premises environment and growing operational demands, EWA engaged ACME to conduct a Phase 1 Discovery & Design assessment to chart a path toward a modern, cloud-native GIS platform on AWS.

Business Challenges

EWA's existing GIS infrastructure presented several constraints that required a structured, phased approach before any migration could proceed:

  • Aging on-premises infrastructure with limited capacity for growth and increasing maintenance overhead
  • Limited scalability to accommodate expanding geospatial data volumes and concurrent user demand
  • Absence of a formal disaster recovery strategy, creating risk to business continuity for critical utility operations
  • Strict data residency requirements mandating that sensitive infrastructure data remain within Bahrain's borders

AWS-Based Solution

ACME delivered a structured Phase 1 engagement designed to establish the technical and strategic foundation for EWA's cloud journey. The scope of work included:

  • Full application and infrastructure assessment of the existing GIS environment, documenting current-state architecture, dependencies, and performance baselines
  • Cloud readiness evaluation examining EWA's organisational, operational, and technical preparedness for a migration to AWS
  • Gap analysis identifying the delta between current capabilities and the requirements of a cloud-native GIS platform
  • Target AWS architecture design aligned with the AWS Well-Architected Framework, addressing reliability, security, performance, and cost optimisation
  • Migration roadmap defining a phased path from the current on-premises state to the target AWS environment, with clear milestones for Phase 2 execution

Proposed Architecture

The target architecture approved at the conclusion of Phase 1 is built on a set of AWS services selected to meet EWA's performance, resilience, and compliance requirements:

  • Amazon EC2 for scalable, right-sized compute hosting the GIS application tier
  • Amazon RDS for managed relational database services supporting GIS spatial data
  • Amazon EFS for shared, elastic file storage accessible across application instances
  • Multi-AZ deployment to deliver high availability and automatic failover, addressing the absence of disaster recovery in the current environment
  • SMB protocol support to maintain compatibility with existing file-sharing workflows during and after migration
  • IAM, AWS KMS, and AWS CloudTrail for identity management, encryption at rest and in transit, and full audit logging to meet regulatory and data residency requirements

Outcomes

The Phase 1 engagement delivered measurable, actionable outputs that position EWA to move forward with confidence:

  • Target AWS architecture reviewed and formally approved by EWA stakeholders
  • Full regulatory alignment confirmed, with the architecture satisfying Bahrain's data residency requirements for critical utility infrastructure
  • A detailed Phase 2 roadmap providing EWA with a clear, costed path to implementation
  • Modern GIS platform design that will eliminate the scalability constraints, operational risk, and infrastructure debt of the legacy environment