Modernizing Kenya Law's Digital Legal Information Platform with a Secure Migration to AWS
About the Customer
Kenya Law (the National Council for Law Reporting) is a state corporation mandated to publish the Kenya Law Reports and provide universal public access to Kenya’s laws, case law, the Kenya Gazette, and related legal information. Operating within the public sector and government enterprise segment, Kenya Law serves as the authoritative custodian of the nation’s legal knowledge, supporting the Judiciary, legal practitioners, academia, government agencies, and citizens. Its Digital Legal Information Platform is a mission-critical national resource, hosting decades of historical legal records and receiving high volumes of daily search traffic from users across Kenya and beyond.
Customer Challenge
Kenya Law’s Digital Legal Information Platform — comprising the public-facing website, the Tausi backend services, an Elasticsearch search engine, and a relational database — was hosted on self-managed, on-premises infrastructure that was increasingly unable to keep pace with the platform’s national importance. The environment suffered from constrained scalability, limited infrastructure resilience, degraded search performance across a large and growing corpus of legal documents, and a heavy manual operational management burden.
In the short term, these limitations exposed Kenya Law to risks of platform downtime and slow search responses, directly affecting judges, advocates, and citizens who depend on timely access to authoritative legal information. In the long term, the on-premises model threatened the preservation and availability of irreplaceable historical legal records, constrained the platform’s ability to grow with an expanding body of jurisprudence and legislation, and lacked the security controls, monitoring, and disaster recovery capabilities expected of a critical national information asset.
Partner Solution
Coresys Solutions delivered a comprehensive migration and modernization engagement following its standard AWS project delivery methodology. The engagement began with discovery workshops involving Kenya Law’s business stakeholders and technical teams to document functional, technical, security, operational, and performance requirements, with key objectives of preserving historical legal records, improving search performance, increasing platform availability, and strengthening security. A detailed assessment of the on-premises website, Tausi backend services, Elasticsearch server, relational
database, storage, and network architecture informed a modernization strategy that leveraged AWS managed services while minimizing migration risk and downtime. The target-state architecture was designed and validated against the AWS Well-Architected Framework.
The platform was migrated into a secure landing zone built on an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) with clear separation of tiers: the public-facing website is hosted on Amazon EC2 within a public subnet behind an Internet Gateway, while the Tausi backend application server, the Elasticsearch search server, and the database are isolated in private subnets, each protected by dedicated security groups. Amazon RDS replaced the self-managed relational database with a fully managed database service for the platform’s legal and operational data, while Amazon S3 provides highly durable, cost-effective storage for Kenya’s legal documents, safeguarding the nation’s historical legal record.
Security and operations were modernized using native AWS services: AWS Shield provides DDoS protection for the public-facing platform, AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) enforces encryption of sensitive data at rest, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) applies least-privilege access control across the environment, and Amazon CloudWatch delivers centralized monitoring and alerting. The engagement also documented the full migration approach — workload dependencies, data migration strategy, capacity planning, testing, cutover and rollback procedures, and operational readiness activities — providing Kenya Law with a validated implementation blueprint for a low-risk transition to AWS.
99.9%+
Uptime
30–50%
Improvement in average search response times
$15,000
in AWS ARR
Results and Benefits
The migration and modernization of the Kenya Law platform to AWS delivered measurable improvements across availability, performance, security, and long-term sustainability:
- Improved Platform Availability: Migrating from resilience-constrained on-premises infrastructure to AWS eliminated key single points of failure, achieving 99.9%+ uptime for the national legal information platform and ensuring uninterrupted access for the Judiciary, legal practitioners, and citizens.
- Faster Legal Search Performance: Rehosting the Elasticsearch engine on right-sized AWS infrastructure improved search responsiveness across the full corpus of case law and legislation, delivering a 30–50% improvement in average search response times for high-volume daily queries.
- Durable Preservation of National Legal Records: Migrating legal documents to Amazon S3 placed decades of historical legal records on eleven-nines durable storage, permanently mitigating the risk of data loss inherent in the previous self-managed storage environment.
- Strengthened Security and Reduced Operational Overhead: Layered protection through AWS Shield, KMS encryption, IAM least-privilege controls, and CloudWatch monitoring aligned the platform with public-sector security best practices, while AWS-managed services drove an estimated 90% reduction in infrastructure management effort for Kenya Law’s ICT team. The environment operates as a live production workload driving an estimated $15,000 in AWS ARR
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.