Client Profile
Global leader in the vacation ownership industry with over 64 managed resorts and access to more than 4,500 resorts worldwide. Client offers a portfolio of turnkey, fee-based services, including a flexible points-base, deeded vacation ownership plan with more than 193,000 owners.
Business Challenge
All of the client’s production systems were hosted at a secure and robust facility, while the development and test environments were managed out of the company’s corporate offices. There was a need to develop a 36-month strategic IT plan in order to update back-end systems and improve the overall booking process.
Given this challenge the organization was looking to migrate part of their platforms to the cloud through a pay-as-you-use model, but was unfamiliar with the cloud provider landscape and lacking the expertise to identify the best one to cover their business and technical needs.
Solution & Approach
Auxis was brought onboard to identify the best cloud IaaS provider based on the client’s workload needs. Auxis conducted a holistic evaluation, engaging four top IaaS vendors, including Amazon Web Services (AWS). A matrix with requirements was prepared consisting of over ninety (90) different “Target Dimensions,” allowing qualifying vendors to understand the client’s needs and share information on their own capabilities and services.
Auxis created a “Cloud IaaS Scoreboard” capturing a thorough comparative analysis of each vendor by ranking their capabilities. In addition to the technical aspects, Auxis also graded each vendor’s pricing model and the need for additional third-party security tools and services. Auxis evaluated the findings, narrowing down the results to two vendors, who were given the opportunity to present their services and key differentiators. AWS was ultimately selected, primarily due to their vast number of ready-to-use services, scalability and price performance.
Given the extensive experience with AWS, Auxis was asked to perform the first implementation of the customer’s main website, which had been redesigned by their marketing team and needed to run on a robust and scalable platform. Auxis built a redundant production platform, which included load balancers, multiple web servers, RDS SQL servers, among other AWS services. Auxis also built a development environment to allow the customer to test patches and deployments prior to moving to production.
Results
Auxis cloud expertise allowed to perform a very successful and seamless cloud selection and implementation process, including the following key results:
- Comprehensive evaluation and selection of the proper cloud provider matching customer’s requirements – Auxis worked to ensure the vendor selected was able to respond to all of the customer’s needs, delivering the best services and support with the best cost model.
- Cloud readiness time – Auxis designed and deployed a platform within a desired timeframe, allowing to reduce cloud readiness time so the customer could focus resources on application development and accelerate business roll-out.
- Successful IT staff training and support – Auxis engineers coordinated and facilitated training sessions for the customer’s key IT personnel to educate them on AWS, how to build components, and perform cloud operational tasks. This effective training program allowed to achieve a seamless transition following cloud migration.