Transforming KeNHA's Permit and Payment Platforms through AWS Migration
About the Customer
The Kenya National Highways Authority (KeNHA) is a state corporation mandated to develop, manage, and maintain Kenya’s national trunk road network. Operating within the public sector and government enterprise segment, KeNHA plays a central role in national infrastructure, overseeing highway development, axle load control, and the issuance of permits for abnormal loads, roadside developments, and way-leaves. Serving a broad stakeholder base of transporters, logistics companies, contractors, and citizens, the Authority depends on digital platforms — including its Permits Portal, Permit Administration Portal, Overload Management Dashboard, and integration with the national eCitizen payment platform — to deliver efficient, transparent, and revenue-critical public services.
Customer Challenge
KeNHA’s business-critical digital services were hosted on self-managed, on-premises infrastructure that constrained the Authority’s ability to deliver reliable, secure, and scalable citizen-facing services. Five mission-critical workloads — the customer-facing Permits Portal, the Permit Administration Portal, the Overload Management Dashboard, the eCitizen Payment API, and the KeNHA API supporting permit verification and weighbridge operations — depended on aging infrastructure with limited elasticity, manual operational processes, and self-managed databases that carried a growing maintenance and licensing burden.
In the short term, this exposed KeNHA to risks of service downtime during peak permit application periods, delayed permit processing for transporters, and security exposure for sensitive transportation, payment, and permit data. In the long term, the on-premises model limited the Authority’s capacity to scale with growing permit volumes and annual database growth, threatened continuity of a revenue-critical payment channel integrated with eCitizen, and lacked the disaster recovery, centralized monitoring, and automated security controls expected of a modern government digital service.
Partner Solution
Coresys Solutions delivered an end-to-end migration and modernization engagement following its standard AWS project delivery methodology. The engagement began with structured discovery workshops involving business stakeholders, application owners, infrastructure teams, and database administrators to document functional, technical, security, migration, and performance requirements. A comprehensive assessment of the on-premises application landscape, databases, dependencies, and transaction volumes informed the migration strategy, right-sizing, and capacity planning for each of the five workloads, with the target-state architecture validated against the AWS Well-Architected Framework.
The workloads were migrated into a secure landing zone built on an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), using public and private subnets across multiple Availability Zones to isolate internet-facing services from backend application and database tiers. Incoming public traffic is inspected by AWS Web Application Firewall (AWS WAF) and protected against DDoS attacks by AWS Shield, before being distributed by an Application Load Balancer (ALB) to right-sized Amazon EC2 application servers hosting the Permits Portal, Permit Administration Portal, Overload Management Dashboard, eCitizen Payment API, and KeNHA API. Amazon RDS for SQL Server replaced the self-managed database platform with a fully managed relational database service for permit, payment, and operational data, while Amazon S3 provides highly durable storage for permit attachments and supporting documentation.
The modernization further incorporated Amazon API Gateway for secure API management, AWS Secrets Manager for credential management, AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) for SSL/TLS certificates, and AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to enforce least-privilege access. Operational visibility and public-sector security compliance are ensured through Amazon CloudWatch for centralized monitoring and alerting, AWS CloudTrail for continuous audit logging, and Amazon GuardDuty for intelligent threat detection. The engagement concluded with a detailed migration roadmap covering workload sequencing, data migration, validation, cutover, rollback, and post-migration verification, ensuring a low-risk transition to production on AWS.
99.9%+
Uptime
95%
Reduction in infrastructure management effort
$42,000
in AWS ARR
Results and Benefits
The migration and modernization of KeNHA’s permit ecosystem to AWS delivered measurable improvements across availability, security, and operational efficiency:
- High Availability for Revenue-Critical Services: Deploying the five workloads across multiple Availability Zones behind an Application Load Balancer eliminated the single points of failure inherent in the on-premises environment, achieving 99.9%+ uptime for the Permits Portal and the eCitizen payment integration — including during peak permit application cycles.
- Reduced Operational and Infrastructure Overhead: Replacing self-managed servers and databases with Amazon RDS for SQL Server and AWS-managed services eliminated manual patching, backup, and maintenance activities, driving an estimated 95% reduction in infrastructure management effort for KeNHA’s ICT team.
- Strengthened Security and Compliance Posture: Layered protection through AWS WAF, AWS Shield, GuardDuty, IAM least-privilege controls, Secrets Manager, and CloudTrail auditing brought KeNHA’s citizen-facing platforms in line with public-sector security best practices, safeguarding sensitive permit and payment data end to end.
- Elastic Scalability and Production-Grade Reliability: Capacity planning based on projected annual database growth and daily permit volumes, combined with elastic AWS infrastructure, positions KeNHA to scale seamlessly with demand. The environment operates as a live production workload driving an estimated $42,000 in AWS ARR, demonstrating a resilient, enterprise-grade government deployment.
About the partner
Coresys Solutions Limited is a pioneering AWS consulting partner based in Nairobi, Kenya, specializing in cloud migration, application modernization, and advanced AI/ML solutions. We empower public sector organizations, educational institutions, and enterprises across East Africa to design, secure, and scale production-grade workloads on AWS. Coresys Solutions holds deep technical expertise in AWS-native security, serverless compute, and Generative AI architectures, serving as a trusted advisor for organizations seeking to achieve business-led digital transformation.