MTI Streamlined Operations in the Cloud

MTI Ltd. is revolutionizing daily life in Japan through mobile services that make things easier and more enjoyable — from healthcare and fintech to music, ebooks, and entertainment. After successfully fending off cybersecurity threats for seven years with Akamai web application firewall (WAF), MTI’s healthcare division turned to Akamai cloud computing services to tackle a range of needs.

One of MTI’s core businesses is its healthcare unit, serving 550,000 subscribers who access personal health data through their smartphones. Keeping up with the rapid pace of technological change, MTI utilizes cutting-edge cloud services, APIs, and innovative tools. Always on the lookout for the latest tech, it wanted to explore how Akamai Connected Cloud could further enhance its capabilities.

“Our web services and internal authentication infrastructure demand a lot of resources, which leads to hefty cloud costs,” explained Norio Akama, SRE Manager for MTI’s healthcare business. “By leveraging edge computing, we can not only cut costs but also optimize performance.”

To take advantage of Akamai cloud computing services, MTI used Terraform and Linode Kubernetes Engine to migrate its execution environment from another company’s cloud computing service. “It was incredibly simple, user-friendly, and cost-effective to get started. A server-side engineer can do it in a day,” said Akama. 

Seeking to maintain top-notch web service performance, MTI runs load tests with each release. It set up its execution environment to launch testing automatically and shut down once complete. As Akama said, “This helped us streamline our release process while reducing costs.”

MTI used containerized applications to replace its data ETL (extract, transform, and load) function, which pulls data from business databases for big data analysis. As data volumes grew, so did the expense. But Akamai’s innovative approach to egress costs was a game changer. 

“Cloud providers typically charge for outbound traffic. Thanks to Akamai cloud computing services, we slashed our ETL costs nearly 50%,” explained Akama.

MTI’s Maternal and Child Health Record application provides WAF reporting services for local governments. It once took hours to aggregate WAF data. Now MTI’s SRE staff can instantly visualize it across its heterogeneous cloud environment. “TrafficPeak on Akamai Connected Cloud was easy and inexpensive to implement, and saved us lots of time,” explained Akama.

Reflecting on MTI’s experience with Akamai’s cloud computing services, Akama summed it up: “Akamai’s flexibility is unrivaled by competing services. Achieving this level of efficiency with other platforms would have been costly and time-consuming.”

To realize a society where our customers can be freer and live as themselves, MTI Group considers it important to develop services that are needed in each and every moment as the world keeps changing day by day and to deliver those services worldwide. Our vision is “Making the world a step forward.” As a partner walking alongside our customers in daily life, we will work to build a better society of the future by providing services that make life fuller and more convenient.