Case Study: Condé Nast goes all-in with AWS Cloud. The company reduced costs by 40% and increased operational performance by 30-40%
About Condé Nast
Condé Nast is a well-established media and publications company known for producing high quality lifestyle content suited for everyone. As a result of going all-in into the AWS Cloud, the company reduced costs by 40% and increased operational performance by 30-40%.
In just three months, Condé Nast was able to migrate over 500 servers, one petabyte of storage, various mission critical applications (such as HR, Legal, and Sales), and over 100 database servers into the AWS Cloud. With this migration, Condé Nast can now create content faster, while improving organizational creativity, productivity, agility, flexibility and time to market.
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Case Study: Online travel company Serko upgrades cloud storage, sees significant boost in database speed and cuts costs by $120,000 annually
To provide the best possible travel booking experience for its customers, Serko upgraded its Microsoft Azure–hosted Serko Online software to Microsoft Azure Premium Storage. With this updated solution, Serko will potentially increase database transaction processing by 300 percent, which will help it accommodate planned business growth. The company also estimates that it will trim database costs by US$120,000 annually.
Booking flights online is incredibly easy: in just a few clicks, you have your ticket. But behind the scenes, databases perform thousands of transactions—searching through hundreds of available flights—in milliseconds. If the process takes too long, another travel site is only a click away.
Serko knows this well, so the company fine-tunes its datacenter infrastructure continuously to ensure that bookings are lightning-fast. Based in Auckland, New Zealand, Serko is one of the leading online corporate travel booking and expense management firms in the Asia-Pacific region. Since its founding in 1994, Serko has been an industry innovator, serving some of the largest corporations and agencies in the region.
Corporate travel departments subscribe to Serko Online for booking and Serko Incharge for expense management. Both are software-as-a-service (SaaS) products that organizations use to simplify the process of booking, approving, and reconciling travel expenditures.
Move to the cloud, enable growth
Serko is growing domestically and in emerging markets such as India, China, the Middle East, and Singapore. Since early 2014, the company has more than doubled its staff, and it aims to more than double its number of travel transactions in 2016.
To accomplish this aggressive goal, Serko needs to ensure that its datacenter infrastructure can handle a dramatic increase in transactions. The company currently performs about 300 million transactions a week.
To scale database processing power quickly and smoothly, Serko migrated the entire Serko Online application—database, application, and web servers—from its Auckland datacenter to Microsoft Azure in 2013. “Moving Serko Online and other assets to Azure gave us instant infrastructure scalability and eliminated acquisition and management costs,” says Philip Ball, Chief Technical Officer at Serko.
Azure is a cloud platform with compute, storage, networking, and other services for creating and hosting applications in Microsoft datacenters. “Azure had the best pricing of several options, and it was better aligned to our strategy because we use a great deal of Microsoft software,” Ball says.
Serko Online uses Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 as its database layer and originally used Microsoft Azure Standard Storage. However, the solution entails an enormous number of input/output operations per second (IOPS), and the company saw a moderate slowdown in the database tier after moving Serko Online to Azure. “The performance degradation was barely noticeable, but we were concerned about what would happen when our transaction load increased significantly,” Ball says.
Upgrade to premium cloud storage
Microsoft approached Serko about testing Microsoft Azure Premium Storage, which stores data on solid-state drives (versus the hard disk drives used by Azure Standard Storage) and provides up to 5,000 IOPS and 200 megabytes per second (MB/sec) throughput. Serko worked with Microsoft to test Serko Online on Azure Premium Storage and plans to deploy the storage technology in its production environment.
For Serko Online, Serko uses 150 A-Series Azure Virtual Machines as front-end web servers attached to eight DS-Series Azure Virtual Machines that act as database servers running SQL Server 2014. The company uses 10 Azure Premium Storage Disks for its production environment—two for backup, two for SQL Server system databases and temporary databases, three for user SQL Server data, and three for user SQL Server logs. Serko continues to use Azure Standard Storage for its disaster recovery environment. All servers communicate with each other over Azure Virtual Network. Serko currently has more than 50 SQL Server databases ranging from 2 gigabytes (GB) to 65 GB in size.
Improve performance by 300 percent
By moving to Azure Premium Storage, Serko was able to boost its database performance from 2,500 IOPS to 8,000 IOPS per pooled disk, a 300 percent increase. “We handle more than 300 million SQL Server transactions each week using eight SQL Server Azure Virtual Machines,” Ball says. “With Azure Premium Storage, we envisage that our current virtual machines can scale to handle more than 500 million SQL Server transactions weekly. This will reduce our overall costs, which is key as we scale globally.”
As a result of this performance boost, Serko believes that it can use the same number of SQL Server database servers to support three times the transaction volume with no performance degradation. “The more reduction in database-tier wait time, the better performance we can deliver,” says Ball. “As our business expands, our customers won’t hit slowdowns as our transaction loads increase. This is critical to our competitiveness.”
Serko plans to upgrade to Microsoft SQL Server 2014 and will use SQL Server AlwaysOn Availability Groups to improve performance further and gain high availability for disaster protection. During testing of AlwaysOn with Azure Premium Storage, Serko observed a 50 percent performance gain.
Reduce annual database costs
By using Azure Premium Storage in combination with DS-Series Azure Virtual Machines, Serko will be able to consolidate databases per each SQL Server instance, reducing its total number of SQL Server instances from eight to four. “With Premium Storage and the larger virtual machines, we’ll avoid [US]$120,000 a year on virtual machine and SQL Server licensing fees,” Ball says. “We can consolidate more customers onto fewer virtual machines and host larger databases.”
Gain flexibility and scalability
In addition to the Azure Virtual Machines used to run the Serko Online production environment, Serko uses Azure for its test, support, and customer staging environments—in total, 240 Azure Virtual Machines with more than 650 cores. In fact, everything except the company’s software development environment runs in Azure.
Serko developed and runs its Serko Mobile application using Microsoft Azure Cloud Services and uses Azure Service Bus as a message-passing layer between Serko applications and the many airlines and other partners with which it exchanges information. “We need the ability to scale our infrastructure quickly, and Azure gives us that,” Ball says. “We can deploy servers when we need them and shut them down when we’re done with them. Our goal is to get to a complete auto-deploy, auto-scale environment so we can quickly move software builds into production with no infrastructure hurdles. This will help the business grow.”
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Yelp Cuts Test-Run Times by 90% Using AWS
About Yelp
Yelp.com provides consumers with crowd-sourced reviews about local businesses. It connects its data centers to the cloud using AWS Direct Connect to access a range of AWS services for its Dev & Test, Automated Testing systems, staging areas, and production workloads. Using AWS, Yelp dramatically improved its development productivity by reducing test-run times by as much as 90 percent.
Long Beach (Calif.) Evolves its IT Workforce, Platforms and Focus
Millennial workers without tech backgrounds and coding on their phones -- this isn't your father's IT shop.
By Steve Towns as written on Govtech.com.
With baby boomers gradually leaving the government IT workforce, public agencies are scrambling to attract a new generation of employees. Long Beach, Calif., CIO Bryan Sastokas says he’s working to attract millennial employees by adopting open source and cloud-based platforms, and emphasizing community-focused initiatives. Sastokas also is hiring more employees who lack traditional IT backgrounds, and the result of that, he says, is a shift toward agile, business-centric solutions. Sastokas talked about his department’s workforce evolution in an interview during Government Technology’s Los Angeles Digital Government Summit earlier this week.
Managed Solution is the premier provider of IT support services and technology recommendations for the government sector. For more information on government specific solutions contact Managed Solution at 800-550-3795 or fill out the contact form.
Connected cows help farms keep up with the herd
By Lorence Heikell, Microsoft News Center Staff as written on Microsoft.com.
Steffen Hake knows the long, gritty hours involved in running a successful dairy farm, a life that can mean climbing out of bed before dawn and working past sundown — but he has an edge that generations of farmers before him never had.
“When I get up in the morning and put on my boots, I don’t go to the stables first,” he says. “I check my PC for alerts about whether any cows are sick, and I’m in the know right away.”
The reason is a modern breakthrough for a traditional industry. SCR Dairy calls its approach “HealthyCow24,” a solution based on the Internet of Things that uses Windows Embedded software and Microsoft Azure cloud technology.
Farmer Steffen Hake and his father, Erwin, use SCR Dairy’s technology on the farm.
This cow-monitoring system gives farmers insights that can boost milk production, smooth the calving process and ensure healthier cows — all while saving time.
And time is important for farmers like Hake, who has worked on his parents’ co-op farm in Wagenfeld-Ströhen, Germany, since 2005 and now manages 240 cows with help from his father and a few other workers. He’s part of a younger, tech-savvy generation that wants to do and experience more, both on and off the farm.
Having “connected” cows through the Israel-based company’s technology means he no longer has to dedicate nearly all of his time to monitoring his prized milk producers.
“If I had told this to someone a couple of years back, they would have thought man, you’re nuts,” Hake says. “But that’s the technology. It works.”
For hundreds of years, the dairy business remained essentially the same. A family would milk its own cows and sell any surplus to neighbors or the local community.
But over the last century, new machines were invented, urban populations exploded and the price of land skyrocketed. These trends and others put pressure on farms of all types to consolidate, specialize and increase production to keep supermarket shelves full.
Today a small farm only needs a few hands to manage dozens or even hundreds of cows, but maintaining a direct connection with each animal is still critical. One big reason why is that dairy cows must constantly be in a cycle of getting pregnant and giving birth in order to produce milk, and there is only a short window for insemination to be successful when a cow goes into heat.
In the past, farmers had far fewer animals and were able to spend hours each day watching their cows for signs, but today, with so many to keep track of, there isn’t always time for such careful monitoring.
That’s where SCR Dairy comes in. The company’s Heatime solution includes necklace tags with motion sensors and microphones that monitor the cows’ activity and rumination levels. Using an application that can run both on-premises or in the cloud, the system alerts farmers of increased activity that often means an animal is in heat or decreased rumination, which can indicate a health problem.
Cows’ activity and rumination levels can reveal valuable information.
“To identify a cow in heat, you need to spend at least 20-30 minutes in the stables per day, four to five times a day,” Hake says. “This time has now been eliminated.”
The system aggregates data from the sensors and conveys it to the farm’s office, and it’s available through a mobile application so farmers have access to data about cows’ heat cycles and health from anywhere at any time. It also allows farmers to make lists, prepare reports, sort cows by category and track each animal’s overall history.
SCR Dairy now has about 4 million tags connected to cows around the world, monitoring their activity and wellbeing 24 hours a day. The data generated from the tags is transferred to management solutions that help farmers make better decisions, as well as providing alerts.
“We have alerted farmers of cows having, for example, a prolonged calving, or a difficult labor, in the middle of the night,” says Matteo Ratti, vice president of SCR’s Cow Intelligence business. “They were able to go out and save the cow. With this technology, farmers get the information they need to manage the herd more efficiently.”
Enabling farmers to be more productive, expand their operations and take better care of their livestock isn’t just good business, according to Ratti— it’s critical to the future of the dairy industry.
“We hear it a lot from the farmers,” he says. “Young farmers are looking for technology solutions to make the work more efficient and more profitable, and they would not go into this business if the technology was not there. They need to be able to be away from the farm and still be connected.”
Running a dairy is hard work, but Hake says he wouldn’t trade it for anything else.
“I like the diversity of my job,” he says. “Riding the tractor, that great machine, that’s fun. Or when one of your cows is sick, and you are able to heal her so she is fully recovered after two days, that’s great motivation to me.”
Over the past two years, he’s realized plenty of ways the technology helps him do more in less time on the farm, which is a big deal for many in the younger generation taking over family farms today.
Hake finds freedom in being able to access all of the information from his smartphone so that he’s no longer tied to a specific location. And now that his family is renting a stable in a neighboring village seven miles away, the ability to monitor the cows remotely has become even more useful.
“We aren’t there very often, so we wouldn’t see when a cow is in heat,” he says. “That’s what makes this technology so helpful. When a cow is in heat or eats less than anticipated because she starts coming down sick, there is a warning indicator for me. And that’s a great thing.”
Lead photo: Steffen Hake, his grandfather, Ernst, and his father, Erwin, on the family’s co-op farm.
Photos by Peer Schmidt/Fokus Werbung und Fotografie
Biologists around the world use DNA sequencers created by California-based Illumina for a broad range of genomics applications including whole-genome sequencing. The company built its BaseSpace tool on AWS to allow researchers to upload massive data sets directly to the cloud for analysis and to store the results long-term with Amazon Glacier.
The small IT staff divided its limited time between maintenance of the company’s forty applications and making sure the outdated email systems were operational–leaving it little time to focus on higher value initiatives. To revitalize its IT capabilities, Helly Hansen adopted Microsoft Office 365. Helly Hansen improved communications, accelerated business processes, and transformed its travel culture, resulting in reduced travel costs by 10 to 15 percent.
As a global brand, Helly Hansen operates 39 retail outlets in Europe and North America and works with retailers and suppliers from around the world. It does so with just 350 full-time employees who work out of the headquarters in Oslo, Norway, and from offices in Germany, the Netherlands, United Kingdom, Hong Kong, Canada, and the United States. The teams typically communicated by email and phone, but the phone systems were outdated and unreliable and sending large files with marketing plans and detailed display photographs over email was not an ideal solution.
Soon after the move to Office 365, Helly Hansen started a pilot program to encourage employees to replace business travel with Skype for Business meetings. “We ran this pilot and, in a very short time, were able to avoid 15 trips and save more than US$20,000. Skype for Business quickly made a real improvement in how we do business,” says Abrahams.
Helly Hansen expects travel costs will be reduced by 10 to 15 percent in 2013, “For the IT team, which is spread over five countries, being able to have all of our meetings via Skype has been an amazing transformation,” says Abrahams. “Now that we can see each other and share our desktops, we can lead more productive meetings and benefit from closer relationships.”
Another way that Helly Hansen will benefit from Skype for Business videoconferencing is by reviewing clothing samples with its manufacturers in Hong Kong. “Our suppliers can use Logitech HD cameras to show samples to the developers in Oslo. We previously had to send an entourage of people to Asia to check samples every year. Now, only half of the team will need to go,” says Abrahams. “Everybody is excited about this; especially the people who are tired of so much traveling and the managers who want to save money.”
“We have one employee who frequently travels between Munich and Oslo. He saw a reduction in his mobile phone bill of more than US$260 a month after adopting Skype for Business,” says Abrahams. “That is the savings from just one person.” Overall, Helly Hansen has reduced the budget for mobile phone costs by 10 percent.
Yapı Kredi
Turkish bank upgrades communications to respond faster to changing financial markets
The pace of global financial markets continues to accelerate. Yapı Kredi, one of the largest banks in Turkey, recently upgraded to Skype for Business Server 2015 to speed communication and collaboration among employees. Management can address all 19,260 employees at once using the new solution, and teams can have virtual meetings that are enriched with real-time video, instant messaging, and screen-sharing. The bank better safeguards sensitive data across all communications channels and has a lower-cost infrastructure.
React faster
With the global economy and financial markets so interconnected today, what happens in Beijing can affect markets in New York and Sydney, and do so within minutes. The rise of Internet banking has also changed the financial landscape. A bank’s competition is no longer just the bank down the street; it’s banks all over the world.
Yapı Kredi, one of the largest banks in Turkey, lives with these challenges every day. Established in 1944, Yapı Kredi is the fourth largest privately owned bank in Turkey as measured by assets. Part of the KFS Group financial services network, it has more than 11million customers, 1,007 branches, and 19,260 employees across Turkey and Europe.
Yapı Kredi has continually invested in communications and collaboration solutions to help employees stay connected and be more productive. For email messaging, the bank uses Microsoft Exchange Server 2013. To share information and collaborate, it uses Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013. For real-time communications, the company, until recently, used Microsoft Lync Server 2010.
There were limits as to the number of people who could be on a Lync call, but Yapı Kredi management wanted to have all-company meetings with 19,260 employees on the audio conference. Additionally, many employees felt that videoconferencing in Lync Server 2010 was not easy to use. Employees who needed to communicate with individuals or partners who were not on Lync had to use third-party conferencing and instant messaging services that were not authorized by the corporate IT department.
“Growth has the potential to add more people, layers, and delays to decisions, but time is very important in the banking business,” says Ali Serhan Çetin, System Engineer for Yapı Kredi. “Interest rates and other financial factors are in constant flux. We must be able to pull people together quickly to distribute and discuss information and make decisions that affect our offerings and profitability.”
Connect thousands of people in seconds
For these reasons, Yapı Kredi was eager to participate in the early adopter program for Skype for Business Server 2015, the successor to Microsoft Lync Server 2013. After just a few weeks’ use with a subset of its employees, the bank is moving forward to roll out the service companywide.
Çetin says that Skype for Business enhances employee communications in all contexts and areas of the business. “We can use Skype for Business to conduct big group meetings,” says Çetin. “Our education department, IT department, product divisions, and other groups often need to train hundreds or thousands of people at once. Or, managers want to update large dispersed teams on how markets are changing. They just open Microsoft Outlook, click on a group name, and launch a Skype Meeting in seconds.”
During such meetings, IT teams, for example, can control employee PC screens remotely to demonstrate a new software feature or fix a problem. They can also copy and paste screenshots and other attachments into the Skype Meeting instant message window.
“Before, we would fly thousands of people to Istanbul each year for trainings and meetings,” Çetin says. “By using Skype for Business, we expect to reduce travel expenses by at least [US]$700,000 annually and improve employee productivity by eliminating the wasted time that travel entails. Plus, meeting and training attendance is far better when we hold sessions with Skype for Business.”
Yapı Kredi is working to load large, media-rich presentations into Microsoft Azure Media Services and distribute them using Skype Meeting.
Make small meetings richer, too
Smaller team meetings are better, too, with Skype for Business. Yapı Kredi has branches throughout Europe and software development teams all over Europe and Asia. With Skype for Business, teams can meet virtually and have five live-stream video screens active at once. “In Lync Server 2010, we could see video only for the active presenter, but being able to see the expressions and reactions of people listening is very valuable,” Çetin says. “This helps our remote teams forge stronger relationships and work together more effectively.”
Teams use the chat feature in the Skype for Business client to communicate ideas during and outside of calls. Multiple people can participate in these conversations and reach decisions, even without holding a Skype for Business call.
“With Skype for Business, employees have multiple ways to quickly communicate, get information, and make decisions, which helps us move rapidly to react to changes in financial markets,” Çetin says. “We can put together loan packages and other financial solutions faster than our competition.”
The company’s human resources (HR) personnel use Skype for Business to interview job candidates. Previously, they used the consumer Skype service for this, but the IT organization had to temporarily open dedicated ports in the company’s firewall every time HR staffers wanted to update Skype. “By using Skype for Business, we can communicate with external Skype users safely,” Çetin says. “We install the Skype for Business client on employees’ computers and eliminate the need to have the consumer Skype client installed.”
Still other Yapı Kredi teams use Skype for Business to communicate with the company’s parent firm, KFS Group, and with other KFS Group affiliates around the world. “With Skype for Business, it’s very easy to stay connected to our parent firm,” Çetin says. “We had this connection with Lync Server 2010, but our family is getting bigger every day, and Skype for Business has a far greater participant capacity and is far easier to use.”
Expand faster with less friction
Çetin likes how tightly connected Skype for Business is with other Microsoft productivity tools that employees use every day: Outlook, other Office programs, and SharePoint 2013. “It’s very easy to send an instant message or set up a quick Skype for Business meeting from Outlook or SharePoint,” Çetin says. “The ability to communicate instantly from our most-used programs increases productivity across 19,260 people. This helps us grow with less communications friction.”
As an example, employees previously shared Microsoft PowerPoint presentations by uploading them to SharePoint sites. Colleagues would then download the presentations to their PCs. However, these downloads used a great deal of network bandwidth, which was expensive and slowed other network traffic. With Skype for Business integrated into Microsoft Office, employees can share a PowerPoint presentation into a Skype Meeting from the PowerPoint Ribbon.
As Yapı Kredi rolls out Skype for Business to all 19,260 employees, training will be minimized because nearly all employees are familiar with the Skype consumer product. “Employees love the Skype look and feel,” Çetin says. “They love the emoji, the little smiley faces, that they can embed in Skype for Business messages. All the icons are the same as in the consumer Skype product, and they can access their existing contacts from the Skype for Business client. Giving users a tool that they already know and love is huge in getting them to use it. Employees have significantly increased their use of instant messaging and videoconferences since we rolled out Skype for Business.”
Help meet regulatory requirements
While employees like Skype for Business because it’s familiar and easy to use, the IT department likes it because it’s an enterprise-grade communications solution with the security and compliance features needed by a financial institution. “When we have to respond to fraud investigations, we can very quickly capture Skype for Business instant messaging conversations and send them to officials,” Çetin says.
Reduce infrastructure work and costs
Yapı Kredi has reduced the work and cost of its communications infrastructure by upgrading to Skype for Business. “Previously, we upgraded Lync Server 2010 infrequently because it was difficult to do so, but it’s very easy to deploy and update Skype for Business,” Çetin says. “Additionally, with Lync Server 2010, we used physical edge servers to communicate with people outside the bank. But with Skype for Business Server, we’re able to use pooled virtual edge servers, which reduces infrastructure costs by $20,000.”
Yapı Kredi uses a Cisco Voice-over-IP (VoIP) solution for internal telephony, with calls going over physical desktop phones. With its Cisco VoIP system in bank offices and the Skype for Business mobile client on mobile phones, Yapı Kredi may be able to eliminate its PSTN telephony system to the outside world. “We have a huge number of offices outside of Turkey, and when employees travel to those offices they can now make Skype for Business calls from their mobile phones rather than making long-distance landline calls. That could be another significant savings,” Çetin says.
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