Implementing Cloud Based Network and Infrastructure Solution for Moby Group

MOBY has been widely recognized for its role in bringing news and entertainment to undeserved populations. It serves over 300 million people through its activities in broadcasting, digital & online, production, strategic communications, publishing, music, sports and research. MOBY GROUP operates in South & Central Asia, The Middle East and Africa. Headquartered in Dubai, the group employs over 1,200 individuals across 16 businesses. MOBY’s local language content in English, Farsi, Pashto, Hindi, Arabic and Amharic spans a range of genres including dramas, reality television, lifestyle and music shows, sports, news & current affairs and children’s programs.

Citrus Consulting Services Enables The Moby Group to Implement a Global and Scalable Cloud Based Network and Infrastructure Solution using Amazon Web Services.

The Moby Group encountered the following challenges which inclined them to evaluate and leverage public cloud platforms

• Refresh was coming close for key components of infrastructure in the data center, hence The Moby Group took a strategic initiative to decommission their existing IT infrastructure and migrate to AWS Cloud.
• The Moby Group had a strategic business mandate to expand their operations in various parts of the Middle East and Africa, they needed to implement a scalable and global solution in terms of their IT requirements so that they are not constrained by the location limitations of IT Infrastructure.
• The Moby Group had a requirement for a secured solution which included the security of the infrastructure, operations and software measures.
• The Moby group had a demand to gather metrics from distributed applications. They required a service which could help them collect metrics from different services in order to monitor operational performance.
• The Moby group had a requirement to record their cloud account activities in order to gain visibility of the changes happening in the account and reinforce their security operations.
• Access to internal business applications was required to be bifurcated among different employees and departmental groups to support separation of duties with proper authorization and authentication.
• The Moby Group required their different resource metrics to be measured and monitored in order to upscale operational performance.

Moby Group’s infrastructure is running on AWS Cloud while leveraging multiple services of Amazon like Elastic Compute Cloud to house the various EC2 Instances designated for different operations of the Moby Group and provide secure and resizable compute capacity on the cloud.

Each EC2 instance has an attached Elastic Block Store (EBS) volume, a high-performance block storage service designed for use with Amazon EC2 for both throughput and transaction intensive workloads at any scale. This pairing of EC2 instances and EBS Volumes resides safely in the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). The VPC then provisions a logically isolated section of the AWS Cloud where the resources were launched in a defined virtual network. The VPC was divided into a public subnet and three private subnets, where each private subnet was host to its own inter-related suite of applications.

The Moby Group also used other services of AWS like CloudTrail which enables governance, compliance, operational auditing and risk auditing along with a service for monitoring and observability named Amazon CloudWatch. Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) was also implemented to help The Moby Group’s digital marketers and media owners send marketing, notification, and transactional emails. Finally, AWS Systems Manager was setup for The Moby Group for visibility and control of infrastructure on AWS. AWS Systems Manager also provided a unified user interface so that The Moby Group’s personnel can view operational data from multiple AWS services thereby allowing them to automate operational tasks across varied AWS resources.

The migration project for The Moby Group nearly took two weeks of effort, in turn subdivided into milestones for setting up the base infrastructure, migrating a group of virtual machines followed by another group adhering to application dependency requirements. The project was concluded by setting up the monitoring and governance tools.

Moby Group engaged Citrus Consulting Services, an Advanced Consulting Partner in the Middle East and Africa region, in order to aid in resolution of their business management concerns. As an agnostic solution provider, and based on customer requirements, Citrus Consulting Services proposed AWS as the platform of choice for the implementation and management of their Broadview and Microsoft Applications. With future scalability, reliability and availability in mind, Citrus guided by AWS Optimized Architected guidelines migrated their application workloads onto the AWS platform utilizing components like Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances and Cisco Meraki for secure access.

• Lower TCO – Citrus leveraged the AWS cloud to offer a reliable and secure cloud platform that enables Moby Group to reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) of running various internal and media scheduling applications, compared to traditional on-premises infrastructure.
• OpEx instead of CapEx – Migrating the applications and various other workloads on AWS aided in replacing the fixed capital expense for IT hardware with variable operational expenses on AWS.
• Speed and agility – With the help of the AWS cloud platform, Citrus empowered Moby Group with an agile technology that enabled deployment of infrastructure needed to support a complete environment quickly and easily within a few clicks.
• Elasticity and flexible capacity – As Advanced Consulting Partners to AWS, Citrus helped eliminate guesswork on infrastructure capacity needs by provisioning only the amount of resources required. Scaling resources up or down as needed and leveraging on-demand access to virtually unlimited compute, storage, and network capacity to meet Moby Group’s Applications sizing needs – As Advanced Consulting Partners to AWS, Citrus helped eliminate guesswork on infrastructure capacity needs by provisioning only the amount of resources required. Scaling resources up or down as needed and leveraging on-demand access to virtually unlimited compute, storage, and network capacity to meet Moby Group’s Applications sizing needs

• A complete change to focus on the OPEX model from a CAPEX model which lowered the TCO by nearly 25%.
• A completely successful implementation of Cisco Meraki on AWS.
• Achieved 100% successful alpha, beta, user acceptance and stress test scenarios and subsequent cases.
• Ensuring 100% business continuity for The Moby Group through 24/7 Managed Support Services rendered by Citrus Consulting Services