SEI - Applied Information Sciences

The Challenge

The investment services company hosted its public-facing websites with a third-party hosting provider but experienced frequent outages and high costs.

The Solution

AIS migrated three complex websites and associated Drupal content management systems to Microsoft Azure in one month, with zero disruption to the company’s web presence.

The Results

The company enjoys uninterrupted site availability, 60 percent lower hosting costs, and gained valuable DevOps training from AIS to improve deployment speeds.

Expert migration to the cloud

A large financial investment firm contacted Microsoft about migrating its websites to Microsoft Azure, and Microsoft introduced the client to us. AIS has deep experience with Drupal, which can be tricky to migrate, so we had no trouble redesigning the company’s websites to run in Azure platform services. Specifically, we:

Set up an Azure infrastructure, which involved sizing the websites and mySQL services, setting up the infrastructure, establishing daily backups in Azure, and monitoring the Drupal websites using Azure operations and management services and Azure Application Insights.
Create development, staging, and production environments in the cloud. Previously, these environments were scattered across the company and the hosting provider. Putting everything in Azure simplified resource provisioning and speeds new feature rollout.
Enabled Drupal integration with Azure Content Delivery Network to ensure outstanding site performance no matter where visitors are located.
Assume managed services role. AIS assumed responsibility for managing the financial investment firm’s Azure-based websites, which includes proactive monitoring and problem resolution. We detect and fix potential performance or reliability problems before site visitors ever encounter them.

One-month migration

AIS migrated three complex customer and public-facing websites in one month, with no disruption to the company’s internet presence.

Web hosting costs reduced by 60 percent

Thanks to the elastic scalability of the cloud, the financial investment firm has reduced its hosting costs by 60 percent. It can now provision resources on an as-needed basis and quickly scale up when traffic spikes versus provisioning for worst-case scenarios.

Improved reliability

Site reliability has improved by running in Azure, which is critical to the company’s reputation and ability to win new business.

Staff trained in DevOps to improve deployment speed

As part of the engagement, AIS helped the financial investment firm’s IT staff come up to speed on DevOps development methods. We set up a CI/CD build pipeline using Jenkins to automate manual steps and help the staff more quickly push code from dev/test into production. Using modern DevOps practices helps the company more quickly introduce new features to its web properties.