“Thanks to Google Cloud and CloudMile for their assistance by providing comprehensive technical support, education, and training to significantly reduce the time cost of migrating to Google Cloud. “

Settour has upheld the philosophy of dedicated service and sensational tours to serve its customers for 60 years. From its first office in Taiwan to now more than 60 offices, Settour's services have also been expanded overseas to develop more original tour packages and products. With the changing times and technologies, the company always puts the clients' needs as the priority. Therefore, Settour continues to launch new services and platforms. In addition to offline channels like traditional travel agencies, they also integrated with an online information network to provide more up-to-date services through online channels such as social media. Thanks to this integration, clients and colleagues at Settour can find the tour packages, products, and customized information they need. 

Faced with traditional IT structural risks, the company is compelled to speed up  its upgrades.

Settour continues to provide professional and dedicated services to approximately 2 million domestic and overseas travelers annually. The immense data quantity needs a capable IT environment and maintenance support to minimize service interruptions. Settour's Information Technology Department came to the notice that storing such massive data on an on-premises data center is risky. Because the website will temporarily become offline and cause downtime when software or hardware updates are required. Settour had suffered from a catastrophic setback that took 3 days to restore operation and caused the company TWD 200 to 300 million in lost revenue. The incident made Settour realize that if they continue to apply a traditional approach, the IT environment and maintenance cost would become unpredictable ; the unreliable system would also expose its customers  to potential risks over the years.

Embracing the industry innovation to enhance the tour quality. 

As Settour celebrates its 60th anniversary, the company continues to uphold the spirit of dedication. Its motivation in embracing the industry innovation is inspired by providing customers with the best travel services. The setbacks in the industry transformation, such as IT system downtime, coupled with the increasing reliance of millennial travelers on digital information, and their preference for independent travel made Settour realize that the industry must accelerate its digital transformation. As a result, the company attempted to move part of its services to the cloud in 2018. However, in light of the hardware upgrade being implemented to Settour's on-premises data center at the time, the company took the opportunity to move the services back to its on-premises data center after taking the overall operational and maintenance problems into consideration.

CloudMile empowers Settour in their every step of transformation and evolution

Considering the increasing advances in cloud computing technology, Settour's Information Technology Department has paid particular attention to potential developments in technology and industry innovation for its digital competitiveness. In 2019, the Settour’s Information Technology Department approached CloudMile, a cloud and AI company empowering businesses to accelerate digital transformation, for redesigning and moving its cloud services to Google Cloud. There were four major reasons to choose Google Cloud for Settour's migration :

• Google Cloud has a data center in Taiwan, offering better protection in terms of faster response or data security; 
• Data compliance for future IPO and listing on TWSE/GTSM 
• BigQuery, a powerful and high-performance data warehouse allows Settour to conduct data analysis subsequently
• CloudMile proactively assists Settour in accelerating its cloud migration process by solving the problem of database latency and various technical issues.

So far, Google Cloud and CloudMile have already helped Settour move 80% of its IT structure to the cloud, which has proven to be exceptionally beneficial, allowing the company to receive positive internal and external feedback. For instance, their clients noticed far better web performance. Besides, the DevOps team's burden and stress have also been decreased considerably. The User Acceptance Testing (UAT), which used to take 24 hours, can now be completed in an hour after migrating to Google Cloud Platform. At the same time, , the website update has almost zero downtime. After the database was moved to Cloud SQL, the Cloud Storage and log backup mechanism provide Settour with greater flexibility in web operation and convenience. Besides, cloud resources can be flexibly adjusted to accommodate a reduction in traffic flow during the pandemic, thereby avoiding wasting resources and saving operating costs. 

The big data team utilizes the BigQuery data warehouse in conjunction with Tableau report visualization to expedite data extraction and conversion, which increased the analysis efficiency by 7 times. Eventually, CloudMile has helped Settour with its cloud migration, allowing the company to consolidate its online and offline resources. Therefore, Settour saves significant cost of human resources and time and can continually provide travelers with more up-to-date, high-quality travel services that meet their needs.