Case Study
UST helps a U.S. technology company migrate email services to the cloud with AWS
CLIENT
Headquartered in California, the customer is a U.S. technology company best known for its networking solutions. Its products include routers, switches, wireless systems, WAN acceleration hardware, security systems, media aware network equipment, and energy and building management systems.
CHALLENGE
Modernizing email environment to increase agility, decrease disruptions and costs
A proven industry leader, this customer’s secure email service, which is hosted in U.S. and European data centers, delivers comprehensive protection for cloud-based email by stopping ransomware, phishing, spoofing, business email compromise, malware, and other common cyber threats. It protects against malicious content, remediates attacks, and prevents loss of sensitive information. The client wants to empower the application with stability to avoid any kind of hindrance in the ongoing process. Specifically, the company wanted to:
- Increase business agility—The customer looked to increase its business agility, so it could quickly and creatively respond to customer demands with improved internal collaboration and optimized go-to-market and IT service delivery capabilities. Modernizing IT functions, and making them more responsive, was critical to achieving these goals.
- Decrease disruptions—Any business disruptions would result in lost revenue and negatively affect other aspects of its technology strategy.
- Modernize IT functions and reduce operational costs—By migrating its existing deployment services to the AWS cloud platform, the company aimed to improve its overall service delivery, ensuring that its secure email service could continue to operate effectively without interruptions while also benefiting from the cost efficiencies offered by the cloud.
TRANSFORMATION
Strategic 3-phased approach drives seamless email services cloud migration
To achieve the customer’s multiple business goals, we constructed the following phased approach:
- Phase 1— Cloud architecture build and deployment onto AWS cloud
- Phase 2— Migration of beta customers onto AWS
- Phase 3— Plan and migrate existing customers onto AWS
Drawing on UST’s experience in modernization of tightly coupled applications, the team was able to build out a comprehensive plan to achieve this goal. New architecture diagrams and documentation were created for each component of the solution.
A rehost (lift and shift) model was followed to migrate the project from on-premise to AWS cloud. Infrastructure builds and deployments were automated through AWS CloudFormation templates. Application deployments and migration of customers were done through Ansible scripts and custom Python Boto3 scripts.
Nagios, a log monitoring service, is hosted on an AWS EC2 instance. Nagios XI is used as the 24/7 monitoring, alerting and dashboarding solution for the cloud instances. EC2 instance roles were created and associated with each virtual machine (VM) that hosts the application components. Nagios Masters and Pollers were deployed in an operations virtual private cloud (VPC) in each region and with each region’s Nagios instances monitoring the production instances in that region. Automatic ticketing is achieved in Jira for the alerts received via monitoring by an integration between Nagios masters and a Jira ticketing tool via a REST API.
The resiliency for the application was managed completely using highly available AWS resources where it runs in multiple availability zones/regions. Leveraging these AWS services paved way for an elastic and fault-tolerant system. AWS CloudTrail was enabled on all staging and production environments. The log files were redirected to specific S3 buckets to which access was restricted. The bucket was encrypted using AWS Key Management Service (KMS). High performance, fault tolerance, and high availability were achieved using EC2 under auto-scaling, application load balancer (ALB), Amazon RDS for MySQL with multi-availability zones and Amazon Route 53 services.
IMPACT
Tech company achieved operational goals with email services cloud migration
Given the scope of the project, the customer wanted to work closely with an experienced cloud migration expert. The company approached UST, and this was a massive project that required a joint effort between UST and the company. UST’s practice is to begin with an in-depth analysis of their data, workloads, and applications. In addition to technology, the project also involved assessments on IT processes, people, skills, security, compliance, and cloud operations. The company achieved these benefits:
- Reduced IT operations costs
- Increased business agility
- Optimized go-to-market capabilities
- Simplified IT infrastructure and applications
- Accelerated provisioning and service delivery
- Improved security