Using AWS, the Crop Trust has been able to consolidate its disparate website backends and internal systems into a single, centrally managed cloud-based solution. “With our previous web-hosting providers, each system had different policies and management interfaces, which was very inefficient from a management perspective,” says Mohammadi. “When we consolidated everything and moved it to AWS, it made things much easier. AWS has a great management console that simplifies everything. I can more easily manage the servers, and I’m saving a lot of time now.”

The Crop Trust also now has the scalability it needs to quickly respond to usage demands on its primary website. “AWS makes it really easy for us to increase capacity,” says Mohammadi. “With Amazon EC2, we can create a new instance in less than a minute and duplicate those instances just as quickly. With other providers, it could take several days just to get access to new servers. And with Amazon CloudWatch, we can track our usage to see exactly when we need to add capacity. We now have the flexibility we were looking for in order to keep up with business demands on our website.” The Crop Trust can also use that flexibility to increase the volume of data in Genesys. “We can really expand the amount of crop data in Genesys with the flexibility we have in AWS. The end users will have much more information to choose from now,” Mohammadi says.

System performance is another important advantage the Crop Trust gained. “Using Amazon CloudFront, we will be able to deliver web content to our users much faster and at lower latencies than before,” says Mohammadi. “That will provide stronger performance for our core website every day.”

Cost was one of the organization’s key motivators for moving to AWS, and it has realized savings by taking advantage of cost allocation tags to categorize and track its AWS costs. For instance, the organization applied tags to its Amazon EC2 instances and other AWS features to better organize its costs across all services. “The cost allocation tags in AWS were critical for us, because we need to differentiate the budgets for each of our systems,” says Mohammadi. “That’s a unique tool I didn’t see in other systems we looked at, and it helped us calculate precisely how much our costs would be for each budget area.” Adds Lainoff, “We have also reduced some of our operating expenses, as our previous hosting providers were more expensive. It is very cost effective for us to use AWS, and that’s so important for us as a nonprofit.” Overall, the Crop Trust expects to save 30 percent of its core website operating costs using AWS.

Mohammadi adds, “The Technical Account Manager is always helpful and works hard to resolve any issues we have. That’s a great feeling, knowing that support is always there for us. It adds to our overall satisfaction with AWS, which is providing the flexibility, security, and scalability we need as our organization continues to grow.”