The project began in 2009, when IT director Jeremy Ward began putting together a strategic plan for the company's IT. This started with an audit of the hotel group's assets, where it found 147 servers, all virtualised (ESX host) running VMware, with an assortment of Windows, Linux and Novel operating systems.

Ward explained to Computerworld UK that the move to AWS was motivated by wanting his IT staff to spend more time improving on productivity.

"One of the key guiding principles that we came up with was that we are a hospitality management company, we are not an IT services company. I wanted to make sure that my staff is putting their skills towards improving the productivity of applications, rather than administering applications," said Ward.

"We are a relatively lean team, but if I can free up 50 percent of somebody's time to get them working more closely with our partners, it actually improves the performance of Kempinski as a whole."

He added: "They can drive the efficiency of applications, rather than spending their time running a backup, changing a hard disk or patching an operating system."