Case Study
AKA NEW MEDIA:
Migration to AWS
Overview
AKA New Media is an award-winning interactive agency focused on creating digital solutions that foster positive social impact. Driven by a team of talented and innovative professionals, the agency is dedicated to supporting non-profits and charities with cutting-edge solutions, empowering clients to develop meaningful digital experiences that make a difference. They take immense pride in the success of their impactful work.
As AKA New Media’s client base grew, they faced challenges with scalability, system reliability and maintaining high availability on their on-prem infrastructure. Furthermore, overseeing Windows licenses, handling patch management, and troubleshooting misconfigurations resulted in significant overhead, wasted time, and unnecessary costs. Over time, these issues made it more difficult for AKA New Media to provide the exceptional service their clients expect. As a result, they looked to migrate and modernize their infrastructure with Opti9 on AWS.
The Challenge
After reviewing the output of Opti9’s thorough assessment, AKA New Media recognized that migrating to AWS would offer substantial benefits, including improved agility, faster time to market, and increased productivity across multiple IT functions. According to Paul Uchitel, AKA New Media’s CTO, “Opti9 provided a comprehensive roadmap for our migration. They conducted a detailed assessment, prioritized workloads for migration, and ensured minimal disruptions to our operations during the process.”
With Opti9’s guidance, the move to AWS enabled AKA New Media to lower their TCO by designing for cost-efficiency and improving the decision-making process when selecting services. Additionally, AWS native services provided enhanced security, system resiliency, and disaster recovery capabilities, which further supported the company’s objectives.
The Solution
By managing all AWS architecture as Terraform Infrastructure as Code, tightly integrated into a CI/CD pipeline, misconfigurations that could lead to downtime were eliminated. The use of elastic resources also helped reduce costs, particularly in non-production environments. With AWS-native services like CloudWatch, AKA New Media’s developers are now able to deliver new enhancements more rapidly, while testing, debugging, and iterating faster than before. Furthermore, with disaster recovery facilitated through Terraform deployments, recovery times decreased from weeks to just hours.
The migration to AWS allowed AKA New Media to redirect valuable time – once spent managing on-prem infrastructure – towards application development & enhancements, security improvements, and Terraform code optimization. The result is a more efficient and cost-effective IT environment, enabling AKA New Media to continue delivering high-impact digital solutions while benefiting from enhanced security, resiliency, and disaster recovery capabilities offered by AWS.
“The partnership with Opti9 was an incredible journey. What I like the most about the Opti9 team is their strong technical knowledge and communication. The team was always there for us, answered all of our questions, and helped us to make the right decisions for our workloads.”, Paul Uchitel – CTO, AKA New Media.
About Opti9
Opti9 is a proven, productive AWS partner that’s helped customers innovate on AWS for over 10 years. As an Advanced Tier Services Partner with multiple AWS Competencies (Microsoft Workloads, Migration and Modernization, DevOps, and Resilience), Opti9’s expertise has been thoroughly vetted to meet a variety of needs while helping customers achieve their desired outcomes.
Service Provided
Amazon Web Services
Client HQ
Toronto, ON
About the Client
AKA New Media is a trusted partner to leading non-profits and charities, delivering innovative digital solutions and services that drive meaningful impact and empower organizations to achieve their mission.