Case Study
How UST helped Vanguard Charitable reduce operational costs by 25%
OUR CLIENT
Vanguard Charitable is a global non-profit organization that offers donor-advised funds (DAFs) to facilitate philanthropic giving - a tax-effective way to consolidate, accrue, and grant charitable assets. Known for its efficient, low-cost approach, the organization has granted more than $18 billion to 126,000+ unique nonprofits globally since 1997.
THE CHALLENGE
Legacy application migration to AWS for cost efficiency and global resilience
Vanguard Charitable struggled to manage its legacy quality assurance environment and faced high capital expenditure and operational costs. The Covid-19 pandemic compounded the situation. Stringent uptime requirements didn’t change, but management of these legacy systems became increasingly difficult. To resolve the situation, Vanguard Charitable wanted to migrate more than 180 virtual machines (VMs) and 50+ complex legacy applications to an AWS environment to improve elasticity, scalability, availability, redundancies, and cost-efficiencies and also comply with governance policies - before its existing hosted environment expired.
THE TRANSFORMATION
Lift and shift migration to AWS with automated security functionality
UST executed a comprehensive cloud transformation for Vanguard Charitable, migrating legacy environments to AWS and implementing automated security and compliance processes. A detailed analysis of the existing infrastructure informed critical recommendations for a seamless lift-and-shift migration, retaining existing configurations for business continuity. The migration strategy utilized the AWS Landing Zone concept to isolate production and non-production workloads and deploy infrastructure-as-code for agility and compliance.
Key components included AWS Route 53, Web Application Firewall (WEF), CloudFront, and CloudTrail for robust governance, security auditing, alerts. Comprehensive monitoring was designed in partnership with Silversky. Autoscaling, using AWS EC2 and Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), improved efficiency and reduced operational costs. This transformation provided Vanguard Charitable with a scalable, reliable cloud infrastructure, enhancing productivity and operational efficiency while reducing costs.
THE IMPACT
AWS migration delivered scalability, cost savings, and operational efficiency
UST helped Vanguard Charitable complete its cloud migration before its hosting contract expired, and the cloud transformation initiative resulted in these significant business and operational benefits:
- Reduced operational costs by 25% - improving budget allocation for other strategic initiatives
- Achieved nearly 20% in total savings - increasing profitability and financial flexibility from better resource utilization
- Improved application security - with robust automated audits and alerts
Explore how UST's transformative cloud solutions can enhance scalability and operational efficiency for your business. Contact us to learn more about cloud migration with AWS expertise and automated security enhancements.
RESOURCES
https://www.ust.com/en/insights/when-and-how-to-rearchitect-applications-for-the-cloud