Moving entire IT infrastructure over into the Cloud

Problem

A small consulting firm was looking for a way to have more control over their IT infrastructure without incurring the costs of owning and managing a full datacenter. Their IT infrastructure was hosted on a large public managed hosting provider and consisted of Microsoft Exchange, Active Directory, Microsoft SharePoint, Office Communication Server, Blackberry Enterprise Server, various development and test servers, and a public facing web front end cluster.

Approach

CloudAdvantage performed an assessment of the consulting firm's IT infrastructure and then recommended that the organization leverage a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) in order to create a seamless connection between their existing datacenter and the Amazon EC2 cloud. Next, Cloud Advantage set up the VPC and then quickly provisioned all of the applications for a testing phase to verify that all of the client's needs would be met. Finally, Cloud Advantage assisted with the transition from the hosting provider over to the cloud.

Result

The consulting firm noticed an instant improvement in the performance of their IT infrastructure compared to the traditional hosting provider. Additionally, the costs for each of the servers went down significantly due to the fact that the consulting firm was able to get deep discounts by establishing longer term contracts with Amazon EC2 for servers like Exchange that would always be kept online. The Virtual Private Cloud allowed the firm to connect the cloud solution to their domain, eliminating the need to re-type passwords in order to get into Outlook and other applications such as their intranet site.