Case Study
Sonifi:
Elevating Hospitality Experiences with Opti9’s AWS DevOps Mastery
Overview
For over 40 years, SONIFI Solutions, Inc. has been the leading provider of streaming and internet services within the healthcare and hospitality industries. With strategic partners ranging from Netflix to Google, and the widest service offering in the industry, innovation and optimization are key to keeping business functioning at peak performance.
As a provider of streaming and internet services, SONIFI provides a seamless guest experience across Wi-Fi, internet services, interactive television platforms, smart devices, and entertainment. Their solutions uphold brand standards for some of the most notable names in hospitality, such as Marriott, Hyatt, Hilton, IHG, Wyndham, Radisson, and Choice.
Focused specifically on furthering the capabilities of their Guest Internet Access solution (GIA), the team at SONIFI developed their own Authentication and Management Platform (AMP) for their hotel clients. This application allowed them to monitor the entirety of their deployed networking infrastructure residing on their customers’ properties, and plan accordingly for updates and patches that are necessary to streamline business functions. With business rapidly growing, the AMP application reporting gave them excellent insight into their greater networking environment but overtime, the manual upkeep of individual devices across manufacturers and locations became a challenge and prompted SONIFI to begin seeking out ways to further simplify their management process to ensure efficiency.
The Challenge
The manual upkeep of on-premise equipment led SONIFI to examining options within the public cloud, and decided that AWS was the best fit for their business’s infrastructure and scaling needs. From there, the challenge was then determining the most efficient way to successfully migrate the GIA hardware that sat on premises into AWS, which is where Opti9 came in to assist. SONIFI was familiar with Opti9’s expertise from previous projects, and was thrilled to leverage the AWS specialists and technical architects to ensure their migration from on premises to the cloud was streamlined and cost efficient.
The Solution
Following the AWS Well Architected Framework, the Opti9 team got to work on migrating and perfecting SONIFI’s cloud footprint. With the goal being an optimized and streamlined environment of SONIFI’S GIA offerings for 2,000 plus sites, Opti9 completed pre-migration analysis, migrated SONIFI to AWS, and began laying the foundation for an environment that can be managed and adjusted from a single pane of glass dashboard. Following the initial migration, SONIFI now leverages Opti9’s managed AWS solution which provides OS, firmware upgrades, ongoing management of configuration, patching, system updates, and ongoing security auditing. In addition to the managed services, Opti9 is now assisting SONIFI with migrating the AMP application data oasis to AWS, which will finalize the consolidation of their on-premises application and hardware into the cloud.
“Opti9’s profound AWS proficiency has enabled us to deliver seamless Guest Internet Access solutions to our hospitality clients through the cloud,” stated Eric Aasen, Director, Technology Solutions SONIFI. “Opti9 has consistently proven to be a reliable advisor and partner for SONIFI as we further harness the transformative capabilities of cloud technology.”
The Results
Since completing their migration to AWS, SONIFI has benefited in many ways, the first being total control of their infrastructure costs in the cloud. With Opti9’s guidance, SONIFI was able to ensure that their environment was built with high availability, load balancing and DR capabilities to ensure the integrity and reliability of the AMP solution. Because of this, SONIFI no longer has to manage their operating system, and is able to offload that to AWS and Opti9. Finally, due to the nature of their multiregional account, SONIFI has updated the security around their operations, safeguarding them from cyber threats, natural disasters, and more. Once the migration and modernization of the AMP application are complete, SONIFI will be able to update and manage all 2,000 plus sites at the touch of a button, eliminating the need for highly technical architects to manually manage the environment, and the complexity of the updating process.
Service Provided
Amazon Web Services
Client HQ
Los Angeles, CA
About the Client
SONIFI Solutions is a trusted partner to leading institutions that delivers premier hospitality technology and service platforms for a smarter enterprise.