Data exchange specialist Hit Rail has migrated its HEROS interoperability platform to the public cloud of AWS Amazon. The move is in response to the digitalisation of railway services and products.

“The interoperability requirements of the rail community are changing rapidly as established railway companies, plus the myriad of new smaller players in the market, address the requirements of the EU TAF and TAP TSI Regulations. We are seeing enormous growth, both in the number of customers on our platform and in their needs for data exchange. AWS provides a robust yet flexible infrastructure with computing power, database storage and networking functionality which we can build upon for our interoperability services, and which will always keep us ahead of the demand”, said Antonio Lopez, general manager of Hit Rail.

Migration

The migration was supported by consultancy firm inQdo B.V. This company will continue to maintain and support the HEROS IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) platform on AWS, in order to “meet the needs of Hit Rail’s growing number of customers seeking to improve their data exchange for rail freight and passenger services”, Hit Rail explained.

“We have now created a future-proof solution that enables Hit Rail to provide first-class services to its customers with the flexibility they need for the anticipated future growth in demand. On completion of the migration project, we have immeditaly started on the job of continuously improving the platform and delivering AWS support regarding the AWS IaaS platform”, Corné van der Steen, AWS Solution Architect of inQdo commented.

Hit Rail

Hit Rail provides telecommunications and IT services to the European railway  community. It connects more than fifty railway companies through its private IP network the Hermes virtual private network (VPN). The company also provides a range of interoperability solutions under the HEROS brand, based on a middleware platform directly connected to the Hermes VPN.

Antonio Lopez concluded: “The services we provide are critical to the rail businesses that are our customers. Moving to the cloud will bring significant benefits in availability, accessibility and reliability.”