Case study

Major Publisher Cuts Costs by Moving to the Cloud

Media and Entertainment
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Challenge

A major publisher, with over 200 national and regional titles, wanted to reduce the costs associated with its growing applications estate and IT infrastructure, while improving their critical business applications and services.

Outcome

We supported the firm in achieving a 30% reduction in the number of applications. What’s more, by providing a unitary price structure, we ensure both transparency and predictability, enabling it to make business decisions on project changes and investments with better certainty on ROI outcomes.

Quality doesn't have to break the bank

In today’s interconnected world, many media companies find keeping up with client expectations expensive. A major publisher, with over 200 national and regional titles, wanted to reduce the costs associated with their growing applications estate and IT infrastructure, while improving their critical business applications and services.

Colleagues having a preparation and strategic planning meeting

Preparation is key

By working alongside the company and taking ownership of the complete application lifecycle, our team identified the role and contribution of all applications within the business, mapping the resilience, service needs, and cost associated with each of them.

 
We transitioned their support model to a central application management delivery model. This significantly enhanced user experience and enabled business efficiency through the broad adoption of enterprise-scale workflow applications, and also delivered the strategy to decommission their legacy estate and migrate them to the cloud.

A programmer working at developing programming

Performance with speed

 

Woman engineer on a tablet in a server room

Every cloud has a silver lining

 

High-level architecture blueprint

Working with the customer, each aspect of their estate was grouped into manageable workflows that could be migrated as atomic units. Each workflow dependency was determined to understand the implications of migrating a workflow and their interdependencies within the other customer environments.

 

Once all of the existing customer infrastructure and workflows were analysed and audited, we investigated AWS solutions based on the five pillars of the AWS Well-Architected framework.

 

To ensure a successful migration to AWS, the below services are part of the solution:

  • AWS Cost Explorer: Analyze and forecast the cost of cloud infrastructure

  • AWS License Manager: Enable the customer to manage the licenses used by the solution
  • AWS CloudFormation: Used to build the IaC templates for production and non-production environment
  • AWS CloudTrail: Provides full traceability related to actions that are done inside customer accounts
  • AWS CloudWatch: Collect metrics and logs related to cloud infrastructure and customer applications
  • AWS DataSync: Used to migrate the on-premises data to AWS storage
  • AWS Database Migration Service: Part of migration, providing support during the discovery and migration of the analytics workloads and application database
  • AWS Direct Connect: Provides a secure connection between customer HQ and AWS
  • AWS EC3 Instances: Used to run the application workloads
  • AWS EFS: Store the application's content and enable sharing across them
  • AWS FSx: Ensure a smooth migration of the file content
  • AWS IAM: Provides the identity and access management layer for AWS accounts used by the customer
  • AWS RDS: Stores the relational data of the applications
  • AWS Route53: Manage the traffic DNS routing across all applications that were migrated
  • AWS S3: Stored the binary content related to the applications
  • AWS Service Catalog: Enable the team to reuse and govern the existing templates across the application
  • AWS SNS: Enable message base communication across the applications
  • AWS Trusted Advisor: Ensures that AWS best practices and recommendations are followed at the cloud infrastructure layer
  • AWS VPC: Provides a secure network layer for each application where the solutions can be deployed

The migration to AWS had a significant positive effect on both the business and our partnership. The process of in-depth analysis on both an application-by-application and workflow-by-workflow basis had a transformative impact on the environments, homogenising OS and server builds whilst vastly improving infrastructure and inter-workflow resilience. This simplified the support and maintenance of the customer estate and allowed for new maintenance windows without affecting production.

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