AFO Marketing

Customer Reference Text

AFO-Marketing (AFO) is a marketing automation and data analysis company that helps clients to achieve better marketing outcomes. Their strengths are their experienced data scientists and their framework around marketing excellence. Their flexibility and customer focus has lead to many client acquisitions with well-known brands all over Switzerland since their inception in the year 2005.

AFO has approached copebit and asked for their support to migrate their on-premises IT environment, particularly the applications, databases and servers, to Amazon Web Services public cloud infrastructure. During multiple joint discovery workshops, all applications, servers, tools and the infrastructure as well as all requirements in the disaster recovery area were documented. Many business and technical challenges were discussed, particularly in the area of scalability, stability, automation, high availability and continuity planning. An architecture, design and migration plan according to AWS Well-Architected principles was built, approved and executed over the next months.

The actual architecture and construction took about four weeks. All components were modeled in CloudFormation, an Infrastructure as Code language from AWS. This approach allows great documentation from the start, repeatability and improved disaster recovery. In addition a design pattern was chosen that specified that AWS Managed Services should be used whenever they fit the requirements. The actual implemented product set of AWS evolves around: EC2, RDS, RDS Aurora, DMS, FSX, Workspaces, Managed Active Directory, Lambda, SQS, CloudWatch, Config, GuardDuty, SSM, Backup, site2site VPN, Transit Gateway and Client VPN. A particular challenge of the project was the huge amount of files, databases and overall data that had to be migrated. An excess of 10 terabyte of data in total had to be transported to AWS. This was accomplished over the public internet protected with highly secure VPN connections and multiple rounds of data verification. During the handover the users were switched over to the new environment and the existing on-premises environment was decommissioned. The migration was executed in time, below budget and with no major obstacles encountered.

As a result, AFO can now focus on their core business and don’t have to waste scarce resources on IT infrastructure. The applications, databases and files are protected with better availability, and disaster recovery is highly improved with RPO and RTO lowered by many factors. The automation of many tasks relieves the AFO team of worries about day-2 operations around security, backup or patching. The financial planning also got much easier as all the expenses are now treated as OPEX.

A quote from the responsible senior project manager Philipp Luthiger: “copebit has handled the whole project, including architecture, migration planning, construction and actual migration for AFO-Marketing. From the initial contact to the switchover to AWS, the project was handled in a very professional manner, at great value and delivered on time and budget. The flexible handling of questions and challenges showed that copebit is operating in a very customer-oriented way. Even after the project has ended, copebit is here for us and delivers support with very quick response times. We have chosen the right partners with AWS and copebit and are very satisfied with the outcome.”