Optimizing Infrastructure Costs Via AWS Migrations

At Desert Group, they continue to hold true to the vision that fuelled their strategy when they started in 1988. They wanted to drastically transform an arid, desert into a lush green landscape by infusing creative design and technical expertise in the agriculture industry. They realized that they were literally enhancing the country and by extension, the lives of the people who live in the region. They built their businesses to meet the needs of people – people who are passionate about enjoying their unique lifestyles. At Desert Group, all of the products are geared to satisfying the needs of customers. The employees that make up this team actually love going the extra mile to enhance the lives of the people they come into contact with. They have outgrown the vision of just transforming an arid desert into a green space. The world is now a focus and will continue to hold true to the convictions to enhance the lives of people all over the world. There are over 6 billion people worldwide; each have a distinct lifestyle that they want to live. At Desert Group, they are on a quest to become the best group of lifestyle companies with the ultimate goal of enhancing their lives. They are confident that they will achieve this goal because of the team who love what they do and have made a promise to provide simple lifestyle solutions while creating unforgettable experiences for the customers so they continue to do business with Desert Group again and again.

Citrus Consulting Services enables efficient operations for Desert Group by migrating all their websites to a cost optimized and a decoupled AWS environment.

Desert Group encountered the following challenges which inclined them to evaluate and leverage public cloud platforms:

• Desert Group needed a decentralized and a decoupled system to make their IT infrastructure highly available, secure, reliable, scalable and cost effective.
• Desert Group was interested in an OPEX (Operational Expenditure) model in terms of expenditure. This would allay their concerns of an upfront payment for the capital-intensive projects.
• Desert Group also had a requirement of a flexible platform which could incorporate and be integrated with various operating systems, programming languages, web application platforms, databases and other services needed for hosting a custom banking application in minimal time.
• Desert Group also had a requirement to configure the C-Panel and WHM on the EC2 instances for the management of the migrated websites.

Desert Group’s infrastructure was deployed in a single availability zone within the Ireland region.

Desert Group’s infrastructure is running on AWS Cloud leveraging multiple services of AWS like Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud to house various VMs designated for different operations and applications of Desert Group and provide secure and resizable compute capacity in the  cloud. Each EC2 instance is attached with Amazon Elastic Block Store Volume which is a high-performance block storage service designed for use with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) for both throughput and transaction intensive workloads at high scale. This duo of EC2 instances and EBS Volumes resides safely on Amazon Virtual Private Cloud. Desert Group also uses various other services like AWS CloudTrail which is a service that enables governance, compliance, operational auditing, and risk auditing along with a service for monitoring and observing named Amazon CloudWatch. For managing the AWS Account, AWS IAM service was used. AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) is a web service for securely controlling access to AWS services. With IAM, one can centrally manage users, security credentials such as access keys, and Permissions thereby control which AWS resources users and applications can access. For Monitoring the provisioned resources and Auditing users Amazon CloudWatch & AWS CloudTrail services were used. Amazon CloudWatch monitors AWS Web Services (AWS) resources and the applications that run on AWS in real time. One can use CloudWatch to collect and track metrics, which  are variables that  can be measured for resources and applications. AWS CloudTrail is a service that enables governance, compliance, operational auditing,    and    risk    auditing    of    AWS    account[s].    With CloudTrail, one can log, continuously monitor, and retain account activity related  to actions  across  their  AWS infrastructure.

All the cameras are configured with a proprietary Citrus application to gather information from cameras from each department. A function was created which takes the data from the application API and perform data transformation and dump the data to Amazon S3. Scheduled the lambda function to run every 10 seconds in order to aid with near real time insights. AWS Redshift and AWS QuickSight were leveraged to create the insights and visualizations.

• On time delivery of project so that critical applications and websites can go live addressing fundamental business requirements.
• Successful migration of the websites along with the configuration of C-Panel and WHM to manage those websites.
• Successful test results for Alpha, Beta and User Acceptance Testing of the entire infrastructure on AWS in order to validate the functionality of the entire system.
• Ensure 100% business continuity of the applications and operations for Desert Group.
• Successful test results for stress testing performed for the migrated websites.

• Achieved 20% drop in the total cost of operations and infrastructure.
• Achieved 100% successful alpha, beta, user- acceptance and stress test scenarios and subsequent cases.
• Achieved 0% penetration points for online application and infrastructure via repeated VAPT.
• Ensured 100% business continuity for Desert Group through 24/7 Managed  Support Services by Citrus Consulting Services