Case Study
Migrating a philanthropic donor platform onto the cloud with Amazon Web Services
THE CLIENT
A donor-advised, fund-sponsoring arm of a large internationally networked grantmaking organization that empowers donors to support causes and charities they’re passionate about.
THE CHALLENGE
Managing rising costs of maintaining legacy infrastructure
To reduce the CapEx footprint and manage below-the-line costs of maintaining legacy Quality Assurance (QA) environments, the client needed to migrate workflows to the cloud. Supporting global software delivery through a pandemic, they also had to maintain reliable uptime and access.
The client needed elasticity and scalability to support proper compliance and governance policies and migrate 180+ VMs and a complex set of 50+ applications. AWS offered the highest availability, redundancy, and cost-efficiency. The client wanted to complete the migration before having to renew the contract at the current run rate.
THE TRANSFORMATION
Seamless migration ensures business continuity
Migrating legacy environments to AWS, the client established new automated security and compliance processes and best practices for internal orchestration and management across the digital estate. Supporting the business case, UST used advanced analytics to discover and map data, workloads, infrastructure, and applications.
Lifting and shifting the entire data center into the cloud retained the existing configuration production, regression, test, and QA environments to maintain business continuity. Subsequent re-factoring and re-platforming would take full advantage of AWS’ extensive cloud benefits.
The UST migration team worked remotely throughout the COVID pandemic to move production over to AWS early while keeping critical donor operations available during this unprecedented time.
THE IMPACT
Client reduced operational costs, accelerated agility, and set a foundation for scaling operations
Working with an AWS technologyartner gave the client an infrastructure built on the AWS Well-Architected Framework which protects information and assets, supports recovery, scalability and provides observability. The client achieved significant performance, efficiency, and cost optimization benefits including:
- High availability
- Manageable, predictable cost
- Accelerated migration ahead of schedule before the contract expired
- Increased digital agility to innovate faster in the cloud
- Reduced infrastructure TCO by ~ 20%
- Reduce operational costs by ~ 25%
By migrating to AWS, the client can now innovate on a more robust, secure, and highly available platform.
EXPERTISE & RESOURCES
Discover our resources
Learn more about the expertise and resources that helped us achieve success on this project.
Digital Transformation Services | Digital Technology Solutions - UST