Present Group evaluated cloud providers and determined that Amazon Web Services (AWS) could best meet its requirements. Initially, the company was particularly concerned about migrating the Epicor system to the cloud, as the business would grind to a halt if the system was not available. After carefully evaluating the benefits of moving to AWS, the business decided to make the jump. “We wanted to move to a genuine cloud and once we looked at cost, the ability to provide consumption-based computing, migration risks, economies of scale, and the availability of information, moving to AWS was a no-brainer for us. What we found during the transition and onboarding was that the AWS account and technical team, and the partners we used to undertake the migration and scaling, helped us ensure the ERP system was running efficiently and effectively,” says Bothma.

Present Group’s decision to avoid re-architecting its infrastructure at the same time as the migration, primarily due to time and budget constraints, helped ease the transition. “We effectively moved the environment as it is to AWS so we could continue achieving our performance metrics for the ERP and other systems,” explains Bothma. “Stage two of the project will involve looking into how we can leverage the multi-availability zone architecture capabilities of AWS, so we can split out the workloads to further ensure business continuity. It’s a matter of timing as to when we will complete that process.”

To minimize the risks presented by the first-stage migration, Present Group set up a direct connection between its existing hosted environments to the AWS Asia Pacific (Sydney) region using a service provided by

Amcom, an AWS Direct Connect Partner. “Once we had set up the interconnectivity between the two environments, we started planning our workload transition,” says Bothma. “Because our ERP system was so critical to our business, we decided to use a third-party replication software to copy information from the ERP system running in the current environment, and the AWS infrastructure. This process worked well and our accounts team was able to keep working on the system while we transferred into AWS, with only an hour or two scheduled downtime when we finalized the database migration.”

Present Group completed transitioning all its workloads into the AWS infrastructure within three months, and decommissioned its old environment. The business relied primarily on the internal skills and competence of ITOC Australia, an AWS Consulting Partner, to complete the first-stage project, with AWS team members on hand to answer questions about billing and console management. The Present Group infrastructure is distributed across multiple

Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (Amazon VPCs), with Sophos UTM—a third-party threat management system from the AWS Marketplace—and a demilitarized zone in one Amazon VPC. This enables the business to safely publish services externally, and to provide secure access to the ERP system for team members using the internet or a virtual private network (VPN). About 31

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances run in the Present Group VPC, distributed across two AWS Availability Zones to balance the availability risk. These instances are set to auto-recover in the event of a problem with the underlying equipment. The organization uses third-party software to provide file-level backup for SQL and Epicor ERP databases to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets, and has written a Windows PowerShell script to create automated snapshots of instances daily and weekly. Its technology team plans to finish moving all the Present Group web domains across Amazon Route 53, and uses Amazon CloudWatch to monitor applications such as the ERP system and its associated resources.

Present Group has developed its internal skills in AWS by requiring a number of team members to undertake training, and is planning to put its system administrators through training to qualify them as AWS Certified SysOps Administrators. This will help the organization become more self-reliant and to re-architect its infrastructure to leverage load balancing and elasticity capabilities of AWS. Present Group is already using AWS Support, Business-level, and is extremely pleased with the response times and ability to contact the support team over a range of channels, including instant chat. “Due to the technical expertise and strong service mentality of the support team, I’ve never been in a position where I’ve had to escalate an issue,” says Cobus Bothma.

The figure below illustrates Present Group’s environment in AWS: