Emagine International’s top priority was to select a cloud-service provider that its customers would have confidence in. One of the company’s preliminary deployments of RED.cloud was for a telecom that had previously used Amazon Web Services (AWS) for another application. “AWS had the infrastructure and security that were acceptable to that provider, and it could scale up or down when necessary,” says Peters.

Emagine’s RED.cloud has to make two decisions in less than 250 milliseconds once it receives data from telecoms. The first decision is whether the event justifies interacting with the customer, and the second is what offer it should make to the customer. “When a customer is about to run out of data under his or her service plan, we can text them to ask if they would like to purchase another 200 MB of data for $2,” says Peters. “If they agree, we provision the additional data in real time.”

When conducting its evaluation of cloud services, Emagine realized it needed expert assistance to build and deploy its platform on AWS. The business engaged AWS Partner Blue Crystal Solutions to undertake the project. “AWS recommended us to Emagine because of our robust track record in architecture, performance management, data security, implementations, licensing, and managed services across the cloud and, in particular, the Oracle technologies that underpinned the Emagine platform,” says James Banister, associate marketing and business development manager at Blue Crystal Solutions.

Blue Crystal Solutions provided expert consultancy and support to Emagine, on topics including cost optimization, licensing compliance, use of fit-for-purpose technologies, future proofing, and design of the AWS infrastructure to meet stringent performance targets and information-security requirements. “Emagine’s requirements evolved during the project and we responded quickly to support them,” says Banister. Blue Crystal Solutions designed an architecture that maximized the use of AWS Availability Zones to meet the customer’s availability requirements and stored more than 11 TB of data within the first three months. “Our AWS implementation passed an independent telecoms security audit with flying colors,” Banister adds.

Emagine is running a version of its platform in an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) to isolate sensitive internal resources from external access while supporting public-facing systems. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) with Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) storage volumes run the servers supporting an Oracle database used for analytics and a VoltDB database used to support real-time decision making. Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) provides backups and archiving of Oracle data. Blue Crystal Solutions’ proprietary monitoring tool—BlueDiamond—integrates with Amazon CloudWatch to provide round-the-clock alert management.