Digital Transformation

This customer is an innovative IT start-up business based in Brisbane, Australia. Their primary focus is to provide clients with a solution to securely store and share files in the cloud. Here's how they moved to the cloud to meet increasing customer expectations.

The Challenge

On top of existing challenges with the physical equipment redundancy and risk, the expansion of the business from individuals to organisations and the accompanying increase in demand made it necessary to scale the hosted environment to meet customer expectations.

The business wanted to:

  • Increase reliability and availability for ‘go-live’ of their product;
  • Be able to bid on business without the need to scale the IT infrastructure in advance;
  • Enable global coverage and localised user experience;
  • Build the company’s reputation in local markets by demonstrating data sovereignty and compliance adherence; and
  • Be based on a cost-effective, highly scalable platform with brand recognition.

 

Our Solution

Venn IT performed the major phases of the transition to the cloud-based environment and of the transformation as two separate projects. The transition project was to de-risk the current environment whereas the transformational project was to achieve the true benefits of cloud hosting.

The approach for the transitional phase aimed at:

  • Minimising the changes to the overall topology and infrastructure
  • Providing cost estimations for the implemented design prior to deployment
  • Maintaining a high degree of security awareness during the design process
  • Validating the security of the built environment prior to customer cutover via penetration.

There was a need to provide testing and reporting on system availability and redundancy along with data backup as well as future-proofing the ability to automatically scale and shrink the supporting environment.

Our design aimed to minimise the number of deployed components (moving parts) and simplify and automate ongoing management and scalability. Since security was integral to our customer’s service offering, it was critical to ensure the environment was designed with security in its DNA and validated through external independent penetration testing.

The “All-In” design, deployment and data migration of service from on-premise to Amazon Web Services, including the total decommissioning of all on-premise infrastructure took place over a period of three months.

By harmonising a number of AWS platform-as-a-service products in a customer design, it was possible to produce a system that was self-maintaining and could scale automatically and infinitely.

 

The Benefits

The new hosting environment gives our client the flexibility to scale on demand, paying only for the storage required at any given time. Our client can now be more agile in its new business activities providing the ability to submit for large projects, with the confidence that the required capacity is in place. There is no requirement to ‘gear up’ in advance, no risk of committing to costs before a project is confirmed, and no time-consuming commercial process of negotiating with resellers after the event.

The costs for the new platform are comparable for a like-for-like comparison. Potential benefits to revenue will result from the ability to scale, agility, flexibility and reliability. The potential to gain larger projects represents a significant revenue opportunity for our client.

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