Cloud Migration for Lead Management Company

Client Requirements

This Lead Management Company is America's oldest and largest independent network of pre-screened financial advisors. It is an independent and unbiased matching service designed to help individuals to find financial advisors who are screened to align with their specified needs in their local area.

The existing infrastructure was comprised of over 8 windows servers using F5 load balancer with Oracle as database. These servers were of varying age and specification to provide resilience and redundancy. Overall, the aging environment was starting to show stress signs relating to performance, reliability and options for rapid recovery due to old and dying operating systems.

A major review of capability and a system upgrade was required as detailed above, and various options were examined across in-house replacement, hybrid solutions across cloud and in house and private cloud deployment considering the upgrade of infrastructure may take months to procure and deploy in normal circumstances.

Solution

After review of current and longer-term business requirements, two specific options were proposed: Hybrid solution with a mix of local and public cloud services, or complete IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) migration.

These two options were fully reviewed and costed. It quickly became clear that a full IaaS migration would manage to avoid a lot of design compromises associated with a hybrid deployment. The decision was made to deploy an AWS solution capable of handling the demands of growing users. Every part of the existing IT environment was challenged to determine its business fit and value, its life cycle position and its future return on investment.

AWS migration was started and complete IaaS migration took place in 4 weeks with hardware / capacity optimization at various levels. Hardware upgraded to 64 bits with latest Windows Server OS, Expensive F5 load balancer is replaced with AWS ELB (Elastic Load Balancer), Five Webserver running Resin 3.x replaced with Three EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) large web servers running Resin 4.x, Java Environment upgraded to JDK (Java Development Kit) 1.8, Two Sonic MQ Server Migrated to One Active MQ Server, Local Email Server migrated to AWS SES services, Oracle 11.x DB is upgrade to Oracle SE 2, ColdFusion 7.x upgrade to ColdFusion 2016 and AWS services like Memcached, CloudFront, S3, Route53, SES are used for performance optimization

Results

Migration provided both scalability and flexibility. Now they can plan server based on traffic and without worrying about future IT infrastructure and allocate resources accordingly.

Cloud migration helped them to reduce both operating expense and capital expense by acquiring resources only when required and paying only for the same. No worry about regular update / patch as most of the cloud applications are updated in the backend, without any interference.

Access to applications via internet and improvement in overall system performance and page load time. This has improved their organic traffic.