As Be Software evaluated cloud platforms, it had some non-negotiable requirements. “In the industries we serve, cloud data must be stored in the country of origin, so we needed our cloud provider to have local data centers in each of the countries we operate in,” says Parletta. “Also, the health and employment records our customers manage must be handled and stored in compliance with rigorous privacy protocols and information-security controls.”

After evaluating Microsoft Azure, Be Software chose the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. “Azure is promising, but our analysis found AWS to be a more mature, full-featured platform,” says Parletta. “Everything AWS says it can do, it can do right out of the box.”

Parletta says AWS also differentiated itself with a simple and highly secure custom solution to assist in migrating data from Be Software’s data centers to AWS. Other benefits to Be Software included AWS support for Linux Ubuntu infrastructures and the availability of assistance from AWS consultants.

Be Software shifted its existing IT infrastructure to the AWS Cloud without making significant changes to applications or architecture. Migrating each data center to AWS took only a few weeks, with almost no downtime. The first phase of the company’s AWS IT infrastructure included Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

(Amazon EC2) instances used as virtual machines to control the solution and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to store backups. All applications used Elastic Load Balancing with the Application Load Balancer option, and the company used AWS CodeCommit for source code management. This phase of the company’s new solution also included Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), and Amazon Route 53.

By taking advantage of the data centers AWS operates worldwide, Be Software met requirements that cloud data be stored in the countries of origin and was able to enter markets in new countries more easily. Within each geographic region, Be Software distributes its servers across multiple AWS Availability Zones for geographic redundancy.

The new AWS infrastructure also helped Be Software comply more easily with ISO 27001 standards for information-security management and Australia’s Information Security Registered Assessors Program (IRAP). “Because AWS is accredited by IRAP, certifying our new infrastructure on AWS took only four months,” says Parletta. “Back in our data centers, demonstrating IRAP compliance would have taken more than a year.”

Be Software achieved its goal of reducing costs, too. “The move to AWS cut our infrastructure and usage costs by about 50 percent in the first year, and we expect to see ongoing savings of about 30 percent in each subsequent year,” says Parletta.

In other words, Be Software ticked all the boxes in its initial business case for shifting to the AWS Cloud. The results were already good enough to justify the move, yet there was still room for improvement.