Customer Overview

Faversham House is a UK-based independent media company that enables insights for thousands of B2B professionals. The company specializes in helping businesses across sectors like sustainability, utilities, and visual communications industries make better business decisions with its services and solutions. Their customers get vital information through a diverse portfolio of digital platforms, exhibitions, events, and publications. Faversham House believes in constructing marketing solutions that drive results and building strong communities and connections. Their products aim to provide strategies to build sustainable businesses, deliver news on-the-go, and nurture a diverse network through its events and conferences.

Business Challenge

Faversham House produces a large volume of content to power its digital platforms, publications, events, and conferences. Thousands of B2B professionals leverage their products to keep up-to-date with industry news while deriving sales and marketing insights. Hence, the company must ensure its platforms are available round-the-clock and are secure to sustain the authenticity of the provided information. While the company was already leveraging the AWS infrastructure to deliver the best of services to its user base, they also wanted to check if their existing infrastructure was working as desired, and if it was ready for high availability with optimum security against potential hacks. Due to the sheer volume of content, it was essential for Faversham House to have a robust data backup and recovery system to ensure that information is not lost and users can access it on-demand. What they were looking for, was a way to manage their infrastructure better, optimize the spending on AWS by removing unnecessary instances/services, remediate issues, and warrant secure access to their infrastructure.

Transformation Story

Cambridge Technology’s Managed Services team began by understanding the current state of their AWS infrastructure and found gaps in the avenues of high availability, backup & recovery, and security. Following this, the team suggested a feasible remediation plan. Our Managed Services team established a single application instance in one zone with a launch configuration having Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) to launch the model in another Availability Zone (AZ) to avoid a single point of failure. Additionally, a dynamic capacity scaling based on traffic patterns was integrated into the AWS Application Load Balancer (ALB) to handle user influx in the platform.

Loss of data is strictly unwanted for a publication company like Faversham House, since content is one of their core areas of business. Hence, advanced mechanisms for backup & recovery had to be put in place to safeguard against any potential loss. The Managed Services team built custom scripts to backup EBS and DB Snapshots and purge older snapshots and AMIs. They also configured a daily automated database backup pushed to AWS’ Simple Storage Service (S3) while AWS Glacier was used for archival and retention purposes through lifecycle management. These mechanisms together, ensured no data is lost and that the data storage is optimized for compliance. To collect, monitor, and make the data ready for operations, the team used Cloud Watch with Prometheus, and also set-up standard operating procedures for business efficiency.

Eighteen million websites are exposed to malware in a given week. For Faversham House, where information authenticity is everything, a cyberattack is its biggest threat. The Managed Services team acknowledged the critical aspect of data protection and built solid mechanisms to fortify their AWS systems. VPC flow logs and CloudTrail were enabled to track while a jump-box, i.e., bastion server, was set-up to connect to all the EC2 instances through Secure Socket Shell (SSH) keys. The team also set up AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) users, groups, and policies to manage user and application access to AWS resources, along with Multi-Factor-Authentication (MFA).

Results

After the implementation, Faversham House could leverage a fine-tuned, highly-optimized AWS ecosystem that helped to deliver world-class business offerings. The team shared the responsibility of continuously managing and optimizing the systems with Faversham House to ensure that their operations became smoother, seamless, and efficient. The highly available and secure facets, along with solid data backup and recovery mechanisms, blended-in perfectly for the company to continue delivering seamless business value. While the configuration of billing alerts and forecasts ensured operational efficiency, putting standard operating procedures brought in business efficiency. The team also consolidated multiple sites and fine-tuned the database’s performance to make the response faster and ensure 99.9% uptime. Additionally, the team migrated the applications to IIS 10.0 and fine-tuned some of its important performance parameters to get the web applications and sites running blazing fast.

The other big advantage that Faversham House saw was cost optimizations. Since the Cloud Watch dashboards made sure that the operational data was being collected and monitored, the company could consistently see how they could cut down costs. The team stopped any unused instances, and optimized the infrastructure to ensure that unnecessary costs could be brought down. The Managed Services team also used AWS System Managers to patch Faversham House’s environment to secure the systems well. Along with that, the team also configured Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) for all the public facing Elastic Load Balancers (ELBs) for data in-flight encryption.