Customer Success Story
Accelerate Cloud Adoption Using InfoCepts Cloud Roadmap for Analytics
Saved a media conglomerate $7.5M through a cloud roadmap advisory and implementation of a petabyte-scale platform
On behalf of a media conglomerate, InfoCepts defined and successfully executed migration to the cloud of a large sales analytics system. The solution enabled multi-million dollar savings for the customer and greatly improved scalability, reliability, and security of its system.
The Challenge
The customer had an expensive, on premise sales Intelligence platform, to monitor and optimize its multi-billion-dollar online sales. With a 6x year-over-year data growth, the existing ecosystem built on Hortonworks and Teradata, was running out of capacity. This led to missed service levels, inability to support new business capabilities and throttled innovation.
The data volumes were expected to grow further with a major sporting event approaching soon. The non-elastic nature of on-premise topology required an oversized data center designed for intermittent peak loads. All these factors combined with the impending end of the data center lease triggered a discussion on the cloud transformation roadmap.
The customer’s apprehension for a cloud first approach, initial lack of leadership buy-in and the urgency to be prepared for upcoming major broadcast event complicated the challenges at hand.
The Solution
An InfoCepts advisory team consisting of cloud architects and technology experts defined a strategy to migrate the company’s sales analytics systems. Leveraging InfoCepts’ Cloud Roadmap for Analytics (CRA) framework—a three-step Define, Design, Devise process—they quickly laid out a comprehensive strategy. Customer apprehension now allayed, the team subsequently implemented its transformation roadmap.
Define
Our team focused on firming up objectives, business and technology drivers, and transformation scope—in addition to benchmarking cost and performance of the existing system.
InfoCepts identified such critical success factors as cost optimization, portability (limiting lockdown), operational efficiency (supporting iterative deployments), minimal disruption, better performance, reliability, and security.
Design
As part of the design phase, we evaluated potential architecture approaches—single cloud, multi-cloud, hybrid cloud—that met identified objectives and requirements. Cloud platforms such as Azure and AWS were compared before selecting the latter as the platform of choice. We assessed migration strategies such as lift-and-shift, rearchitecting as cloud-native, and replatforming. In the end, our customer favored rearchitecting for the initial phase while considering replatforming (where needed) in the future.
InfoCepts executed multiple proof of concepts on AWS before establishing S3 suitability for the primary data store, EMR for data processing, and data access using HIVE and Athena. Our capacity planning templates helped define the business case with respect to future capacity estimates and budgets.
Devise
Here our team estimated the migration efforts, developed a project plan with high-level timelines and estimated a five-year TCO view. We held multiple discussions with key stakeholders to refine the plan before finalizing the roadmap. This resulted in the following customer benefits:
- Enabled the customer to embark on the cloud-first strategy with confidence
- Leadership alignment on the long-term vision paved the way for smooth change management
- Received a clear vision of expected costs and effort savings to assist in securing budgets
Other important takeaways from our advisory included:
- Secondary research and initial architecture choice analysis helped save time and costs while providing a thorough analysis
- Multiple POCs run on AWS and shortlisted tools helped surface constructive issues and assisted in a “get it right the first time” implementation
- Building a clear business case with cost and benefit estimates helped establish success criteria, constraints, and design considerations for execution and architecting strategy
Implement
Over eight months InfoCepts partnered with our client to realize its roadmap. During implementation, we migrated five data products and more than a petabyte of data sourced from 40+ sources. And project completion met the planned timeline despite last-minute changes introduced by CCPA compliance requirements and the COVID-19 impact.
Subsequently, using the Cloud Cost Monitor (CCM) accelerator, the InfoCepts team optimized our customer’s monthly cloud spend by more than 40% (from $140k to $80k per month). Our team utilized the spend monitoring dashboard which unified spend related data across cloud and PaaS services to provide actionable insights for monitoring and optimizing spend. CCM also provided real-time visibility into spend by project which enabled our customer to make chargeback, resource optimization, and budget decisions with ease.
The Customer
Our customer is an American mass media and entertainment conglomerate catering to a global audience. It owns and operates a large portfolio of businesses that includes television networks, theme parks, and internet-based businesses.
Industry
Media
Business Function
Sales
Solutions
Cloud Migration
Technologies
AWS, S3, EMR, Athena, Hive
Solution Accelerators
Quick to Cloud (Q2C), Cloud Cost Monitor (CCM)
Geography
North America
Year
2020
I express our thanks for the amazing work that the InfoCepts cloud migration team did in moving our analytics ecosystem from on-premise Hadoop into AWS cloud. This project represented a tremendous lift, with a lot of moving parts and tons of complexity.”
The Result
Our customer benefits from the implementation in the following ways:
- Savings of more than $7.5 million in data center costs over a ten-year period
- Enhanced business experience with 80% reduction in monthly reported incidents
- 80% faster time to market for new application feature implementation
- Future-proof solution with just-in-time infrastructure elasticity on an as-needed basis
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