U.S. Air Force Soaring to the Cloud with Office 365
By Leigh Madden | Senior Director, U.S. Air Force, Microsoft
For the United States Air Force, one of largest departments within the Department of Defense (DoD), having instant access to secure email and unified capabilities that enable real-time conversations can make all the difference when it comes to responding to threats at a moment’s notice or nimbly managing service-wide logistics.
The Air Force, along with the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA), understands that Microsoft offers secure cloud technology that can help provide the productivity and collaboration services that Service members need to fulfill their mission.
Last week, the Air Force, in partnership with the DLA, announced it awarded more than 100,000 seats of a DoD-dedicated version of Microsoft Office 365 to Microsoft, Dell, and General Dynamics through its Collaboration Pathfinder (CP) project.
The agreement, which has the potential to scale up in reach, is expected to help the Air Force and DLA reduce costs significantly over the next three years. The agreement is one of the largest commercial cloud contracts in DoD history.
As part of the deployment, which will begin in the next government fiscal year, the Air Force will have access to secure e-mail, calendaring, Office Web Applications, Skype for Business, and other important collaboration tools, helping the agency communicate more easily across active, civilian, and reserve personnel and move toward a consolidated mobile and messaging platform. Just as important, the Air Force anticipates that the migration will help it realign critical resources to better support its mission in a trusted cloud environment.
As noted in the Defense Information Systems Agency’s (DISA) Strategic Plan, cloud computing plays an increasingly vital role in the DoD. Its ability to provide agile capabilities and real-time access to data is constantly enhancing the DoD’s decision-making skills and daily operations.
In addition, by securely combining commercial and government services with Microsoft’s trusted Cloud for Government solution, the Air Force is demonstrating its commitment to building on the successful DoD Enterprise Email (DEE) initiative and its support of the DoD’s unique security requirements and best practices.
No organization deserves a more enterprise- and security-ready approach than the Air Force. This announcement shows that when it comes to a trusted, secure, and productivity-enabled cloud, Microsoft is up to the task.
To reduce operating costs and find more effective ways to attract and retain customers in the hyper-competitive airline industry, United Airlines is working with Microsoft to expand private cloud computing to the enterprise. United Airlines uses Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V Replica and Microsoft Azure Site Recovery to expedite the migration and consolidation of virtual machines and mission critical services to its new data center in Chicago and provide high availability services when hardware fails.
“To build an eight-node cluster in cooperation with the storage and networking teams used to take three to five days. Now the operations team can do it all themselves in a half-day.” Richard Wilson, Principle Architect United Airlines
Situation
Following its 2010 merger with Continental Airlines, United Airlines is reaching new levels of customer satisfaction. Headquartered in Chicago, Illinois, the company was rated the world’s most admired airline on Fortune magazine’s 2012 airline-industry list of the World’s Most Admired Companies.
Behind the accolades, the United IT team works to keep the underlying reservation system, baggage-handling system, public website, aircraft maintenance records, database servers, and countless other computer systems running flawlessly around the clock. It is hard work and it means that the IT team is constantly looking for ways to deliver new services faster and to streamline both its capital outlay on servers and the operational expenses involved in running them.
“The airline industry in incredibly competitive,” says Eric Craig, Managing Director of Enterprise Architecture at United Airlines. “We have the most comprehensive network on earth, but that’s not enough. We have to earn our customers’ business on each and every flight with the great on-time performance, excellent customer service, and innovative features our customers want. Our IT infrastructure needs to be reliable, cost effective, and highly adaptive so we can invest more capital into our customer facing products rather than data center servers.”
Early Virtualization Projects
In 2008, United made significant progress in building a cost-effective, flexible, and scalable IT infrastructure by virtualizing its data center infrastructure. Virtualization not only helped United to reduce IT costs but also to improve business agility—the ability to respond to business needs faster by deploying virtual machines in hours rather than weeks.
United even virtualized its business-critical United.com website and reservation system, which was running on physical servers. “United.com is an incredibly important channel for us,” Craig says. “Between 30 and 40 percent of the airline’s revenue comes from United.com—in excess of [US]$10 billion annually—so it needs to be running on a resilient, adaptive, and scalable infrastructure.”
At around the same time prior to the merger, Continental had virtualized about half of its Houston infrastructure, using the Hyper-V technology in the Windows Server Datacenter operating system.
Merger Provides Incentive for Cloud Computing
Following the 2010 merger with Continental Airlines, United Airlines determined that the airline should continue along the virtualization path and adopt private cloud computing, which encompasses reliable, scalable, on-demand compute, storage, and networking services and offers point-and-click resource provisioning for business units and self-service provisioning for the software development organization.
“With the automated management capabilities of private cloud computing, we are responding to business needs to increase compute capabilities, or to improve performance to minutes instead of days,” Craig says. “The ability to move applications from one server to another without disrupting your business, or to roll back an installation when you deploy a product that didn’t quite work out—that kind of adaptability and manageability is a great cost reducer and business enabler. Private cloud computing is the only way to get from 50 servers per administrator to 1,000 servers per administrator.”
United.com IT staff wanted to ensure its infrastructure had the resilience, scalability, and manageability required to boost the airline’s competitive position in the aviation industry. The IT team also wanted to have high availability as a foundational feature of its new data center to minimize downtime for its business-critical systems.
“We can’t afford any service outages, so it was important to pick the right high availability and disaster recovery (DR) solution: resilient, flexible, easy-to-use, and cost-effective,” says Richard Wilson, Principle Architect, Microsoft Private Cloud and Windows Server at United Airlines. “Our existing manual failover scenarios and expensive storage arrays were from multiple vendors and they were complex to manage.”
At the same time, United wanted to consolidate its data centers. It decided to close its Houston, Texas-data center facility and it needed an efficient, automated method to migrate its virtualized Microsoft infrastructure in Houston to its new, more cost-effective data center in Chicago. Each of these scenarios would benefit from a cloud computing solution.
“To exploit the power of cloud computing, we needed a partner that offered more than just a powerful hypervisor,” says Wilson. “We also needed a comprehensive management tool that we could use to manage the cloud fabric, from the physical servers to the virtual machines, storage, and networking environments.”
Solution
United Airlines is using the Windows Server 2012 operating system, including Hyper-V virtualization technologies, as part of the technology stack for the private cloud. “Microsoft technologies are easy to work with, interoperable, flexible, and cost-effective,” says Wilson. “As such, we see the Microsoft private cloud as a strategic enabler to streamline our integration efforts, and as a way to reduce the cost and complexity of the merger.”
Microsoft System Center 2012 data center solutions serve critical roles in United’s private cloud strategy and work well with other management tools. “United Airlines is a large, technically heterogeneous and complicated enterprise. No one tool can provide everything we need,” says Craig. “System Center is an important component of our management stack, providing orchestration, provisioning, migration, and automated recovery services throughout a large portion of our IT landscape. Microsoft recognizes the management challenges of large enterprises and has ensured that System Center interoperates well with the rest of our tool stack.”
Working with Microsoft
Part of the decision to choose Microsoft technologies lies in the close working relationship that has developed between United and Microsoft. Before the merger, both Continental and United had participated in many Microsoft Rapid Deployment and Technology Adoption Programs. Post-merger, United joined the Technology Adoption Program for System Center 2012.
“This was a great opportunity to work with the product team and gain early access to the features, the ability to have input and shape what the product will look like, and to get features that we really needed,” says Wilson. “Over the last couple of years, we have been extremely happy with the support and knowledge of Microsoft Services Consulting, which has yielded some IT highlights post-merger.”
Migrating United.com to a Hyper-V Private Cloud Environment
One of these highlights is a joint Microsoft and United project to accomplish the migration of United.com to a Hyper-V private cloud environment. In March 2012, with the private cloud up and running, the United IT team pulled off what Craig calls “one of the most complicated, massive cutovers in transportation history”— which included moving the business-critical United.com website from a physical server environment to a Hyper-V cloud environment.
“We did continuous system testing prior to the cutover date—both scale and functionality testing,” Craig says. “We also worked with our business partners to ascertain all the scenarios that were likely to drive traffic patterns up or down during the migration.”
As the Microsoft and United team members were modeling those scenarios, they discovered that they didn’t have enough servers supporting United.com to respond to worst-case scenarios. They quickly solved this issue by taking advantage of automated build development.
“Just two or three days before this incredibly important event, we deployed enough Hyper-V virtual machines to support the site, and we did it in hours using automated server builds and application deployment,” says Craig. “Physical host builds used to take days to complete and a 30-page manual document. We reduced this to 2.5 hours with automation. We would not have been able to respond in such a short time without the private cloud technologies we had in Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012.”
Building a Disaster Recovery Solution
To address the need for an enterprise-ready disaster recovery solution, in June 2013 United Airlines joined the Rapid Deployment Program (RDP) for Windows Server 2012 R2. “Now that we are more virtualized, we are looking at a whole new approach to DR, where flexibility and cloud computing combine to provide a resilient solution that we can tailor to meet our needs,” says Wilson. “It made sense to continue on our cloud journey with a Microsoft DR solution.”
Hyper-V Replica offers a data replication solution that replicates virtual machines within a site or to a remote site. The latest version of Hyper-V Replica provides the flexibility that United is looking for, with variable replication frequency—from 30 seconds up to 15 minutes—and support for extended replication to a third site. And the new DR management service, Microsoft Azure Site Recovery, answers the airline’s need for a highly available DR solution because it is delivered as a cloud service running in the Microsoft Azure environment. Azure Site Recovery offers orchestration at scale delivered via recovery plans, so United IT staff can bring up applications in a desired manner at a low recovery time objective. While Azure Site Recovery is a feature of Windows Server 2012 R2, it supports backwards compatibility with all versions of Hyper-V Replica.
Enabling Data Center Migrations
During the RDP, the IT team realized it could use Hyper-V Replica and Azure Site Recovery for the migration of virtual machines from Houston to Chicago. “We were excited by this unusual use-case scenario, which underlies the flexibility of Microsoft technologies,” says Wilson. “Being able to take advantage of these technologies to migrate services sets a DR solution from Microsoft apart from other solutions available in the market.”
In Houston, the IT team deployed servers running Windows Server 2012 R2 as a pre-migration environment and installed a 1-gigabit circuit between Houston and Chicago for the replications. “We’ll use Azure Site Recovery to initiate the failover so that the virtual machines will become live in Chicago,” says Wilson. “When we complete the Houston migration, we’ll use the same solution to replicate non-production systems from our data center in Charlotte, North Carolina, to our center in Chicago. Then, we plan on using Hyper-V Replica and Azure Site Recovery as a cost-effective DR infrastructure between our data centers.”
Benefits
United Airlines is using Microsoft virtualization technologies to streamline its integration efforts, reducing the resources required to consolidate its IT environment following the merger. At the same time, the company is creating an agile, responsive, cloud-based IT environment that will help build long-term adaptability and resilience in the highly competitive aviation industry.
Improves Business Agility, Customer Service
Even when it comes to the vagaries of the global airline system, United is using private cloud computing to accommodate fluctuations in site traffic on United.com and keep its customers happy. “The airline industry must respond to unpredictable global events in real time—natural disasters, security threats, changes in travel demand caused by other transportation sectors—all sorts of things will happen all over the earth that can send customers to our site, and we won’t be able to predict the traffic patterns,” says Craig. “We also have to accommodate predictable events, such as marketing campaigns or fare sales. The point is, we need to scale United.com quickly and dynamically. With System Center 2012, we can automatically match computing power to website traffic. That’s IT that truly supports the business.”
The key to winning sales and driving consumer loyalty is the ability to offer more competitive online services for customers. United Airlines intends to use System Center 2012 R2 in its development environment to improve business agility by reducing time-to-market and introducing competitive online services before other airlines. “What’s the duty of an infrastructure team to the rest of the business? It’s to provide a resilient, scalable, rich, flexible infrastructure so that when the business comes to you and says, ‘I want to implement a brand new application,’ you can roll out those new technologies quickly, easily, and cost-effectively,” Craig says.
Reduces IT Costs
United Airlines stands to save millions of dollars in data center costs through private cloud computing. Aiming for 100 percent reliability of United.com, the company used to buy more computing capacity than it needed to have capacity in reserve. However, availability through redundancy was expensive. With cloud computing, the cloud fabric flexes to absorb traffic bursts, and workloads move around the cloud dynamically to make maximum use of resources.
Cloud computing also lowers the cost of rolling out new services. “We had all these physical servers, and before we deployed anything new, we would take some of them out of service, deploy the new application on them, wait a couple of days to see if it was OK, and then bring the service online,” Craig says. “This was inefficient from a capital allocation perspective. We needed something less expensive and more dynamic. Using private cloud computing is a far smarter approach.”
The engineering team that is using System Center to develop applications for Microsoft SharePoint is saving labor, power, and rack space costs by building out the collaboration environment in the cloud. “To build an eight-node cluster in cooperation with the storage and networking teams used to take three to five days,” says Wilson. “Now the operations team can do it all themselves in a half-day. That’s just one small group; when this development approach spreads across the company, efficiencies and cost savings will increase exponentially.”
Supports Business Continuity
Deploying the latest business continuity solution is the airline’s most recent step forward in its cloud computing journey with Microsoft. United is using its new disaster recovery solution to achieve the following benefits:
Multipurpose solution provides extra value. While peace of mind is a significant benefit, a DR solution can represent a lot of IT resources sitting in readiness on the shelf. This is not the case with United today. “We’re using our Microsoft DR solution to expedite a key operational project—migrating our Hyper-V virtualized environment from Houston to Chicago—while reducing risk and management overhead,” says Wilson. “The faster we get our workloads to run in the more efficient Chicago facility, the faster we can start to reduce our data center overhead.”
Resilient disaster recovery reduces downtime. On-premises DR software is susceptible to the disasters that can hit a data center. But no matter what happens on the ground, United IT staff can always access their Azure Site Recovery panel through an Internet connection. “With Azure Site Recovery, we have an always available management panel to enact our DR plans as soon as possible, reducing downtime,” says Wilson.
Reduced costs. United had already shipped several sophisticated storage arrays to Houston to use for the replication, but now it can repurpose that investment for other purposes. “Hyper-V Replica and Azure Site Recovery will allow us to use lower-cost storage platforms and still get the resiliency we need. This solution will save us a lot of money,” says Wilson.
Simplified recovery orchestration reduces IT management. The IT team is confident that the new high availability and DR solution won’t be a drain on their time. “From what we have seen, this isn’t going to be a system that will be difficult to set up and support,” says Wilson.
Increased flexibility saves bandwidth. “With flexible replication intervals, we can reduce replication times for critical systems, such as reservations, and save bandwidth by allotting longer replication intervals to a system that isn’t used as frequently,” says Wilson. “We are excited to put our new solution from Microsoft into production.”
Concludes Craig, “Because our industry is so incredibly cost-sensitive, it’s essential that we’re getting every penny’s worth of value out of every IT asset we have in our enterprise. We can’t waste money on spare server capacity or data center costs. With a Microsoft private cloud solution, we are able to reduce our IT costs dramatically.”
Transform the data center
The hybrid cloud from Microsoft transforms the data center by extending existing investments in skills and technology with public cloud services and a common set of management tools. With an on-premises infrastructure connected to the Microsoft Azure platform, you can deliver services faster and scale up or down quickly to meet changing needs.
Pinterest is no stranger to rapid growth, expanding from 50,000 users to 17 million in 9 months. Now at 48 million users, Pinterest was able to scale its business because it was built on Amazon Web Services (AWS). With a company of fewer than 12 employees, Pinterest didn’t want to dedicate staff time to managing a data center. Instead, Pinterest uses AWS to manage a high-performance social application that stores more than 8 billion objects and 400 terabytes of data in the AWS Cloud using Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and 225,000 instance hours a month with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).
Read more customer success stories or search by industry to learn how Managed Solution helps businesses implement technology productivity solutions.
Microsoft and Its Technology Partners Help Smaller Companies Take Advantage of Cloud and Mobile Technologies
By: David Smith, General Manager of Worldwide SMB
Let’s talk about a catch-22 that many business owners find themselves in – and it doesn’t matter the size of the company or the type of business they own. They recognize the value of adopting technology to better run their business, but they have a hard time determining the exact technology solutions that meet the needs of their unique companies and staff.
In fact, according to a recent survey by CompTIA, 47 percent of small businesses are only moderately close or not at all close to where they want to be in terms of utilizing technology to improve their business.
Two areas of technology that commonly vex small and medium-sized business (SMB) leaders these days are cloud and mobile. They know they want to take advantage, and many have started to leverage these technologies, but with so many options, which one is the best for your business?
At Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) in Orlando this week, more than 11,000 of our best and brightest technology partners converged to figure out how to help businesses solve their technology and business challenges. And among lots of exciting news and discussion, two announcements in particular promise to have an impact on small businesses looking to gain an edge.
Cloud Solutions That Meet the Unique Needs of Your Company
The first announcement involves Microsoft’s Cloud Solutions Provider (CSP) program. In addition to Office 365, Windows Intune and Enterprise Mobility Suite (EMS), CSP partners can now offer SMB customers Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online. So not only do SMBs have access to more cloud-based tools, but they can have them all bundled in one simple bill from a single vendor, who becomes their hands-on partner in cloud computing.
The benefit of working with a cloud solution partner — like Eastridge or Palmetto Technology Group, for example — is that they can help you choose and onboard the tools you need to achieve a variety of business goals, from better collaboration to better customer management. And with a partner managing these tools, business leaders can focus on other tasks, like acquiring new customers and growing your business.
In a recent survey of SMBs conducted by Deloitte, heavy cloud users saw 26 percent faster growth and 21 percent higher profit than companies that don’t utilize the cloud.
Finding a partner to help you answer the “how” part of the cloud is really important. Because the answer to the “why” question is clear: In a recent survey of SMBs conducted by Deloitte, heavy cloud users saw 26 percent faster growth and 21 percent higher profit than companies that don’t utilize the cloud. And two-thirds of all SMBs surveyed believe that the cloud allows them to beat their competitors.
More Mobile
Mobility is another area of vast potential for SMBs. According to IDC, SMBs that experience revenue growth are 54 percent more likely than average to have made supporting mobile workers a priority. Mobile devices and mobile management services like Intune untether people from their desks, freeing them to work on the go — whether that’s in route to a customer meeting, during a daily commute or even just from the balcony or a different room in the office.
Take Dan Prud’homme of Carolina Realty Group as an example. Through Windows devices and cloud services like Office 365, his office is nearly paperless, and he’s powering a truly mobile workforce that connects more quickly and reliably both in the office and out in the field. He also uses Skype to showcase and sell homes to potential buyers who can’t see a property in-person – all via his phone or tablet.
Other companies are using Microsoft Surface tablets to arm employees with more information, better resources and mobile points-of-sale on the show floor. Alex Shvartzman, owner of Brooklyn-based Kings Games, has noticed this having a positive impact on sales. Since his employees can call up product reviews, research information on specific games and ring up sales all using one device, a customer asking a question quickly and easily turns into a customer making a purchase.
According to IDC, SMBs that experience revenue growth are 54 percent more likely than average to have made supporting mobile workers a priority.
Which brings us to the second big announcement coming out of WPC this week: Microsoft is increasing the number of partners that can sell Surface globally. And the big advantage for SMBs is that partners can provide Surface tablets with the exact apps and functionality their customers need. So rather than trying to build a smooth-running mobile point-of-sale system piece by piece, you can work with one technology partner who handles the device as well as the apps and integration. And that technology provider will also offer service and support for all of your Surface devices.
Final Thoughts
This week’s announcements give SMBs of all stripes, from a small retailer with five employees to a pharmaceutical research company with 50 employees, even greater access to game-changing technology and best practices. Being considered a “small” business is no longer a disadvantage. Smaller companies are having big impact nowadays and Microsoft and our technology partners are here to help.
Vision Keynote recap: We’re committed to our partners’ success by Gavriella Schuster, General Manager, Worldwide Partner Group. Posted yesterday, July 15, 2015.
I hope everyone at today’s Vision Keynote or watching the live stream enjoyed the experience as much as I did. It’s such an honor to speak to our partner community, to share your amazing successes, to discuss our investments and plans for the future, and to feel the energy and enthusiasm in the room. As I said this morning, we have the most powerful partner ecosystem in the industry, and I’m proud to be a part of it.
Of course, to stay strong and continue moving forward takes work, and today I detailed some of the work we’re doing to support you and help you continue to thrive. I spoke this morning about investments we’re making to increase your market value, amplify your marketing impact, and grow your market influence. I’d like to take a moment to recap those points, and I invite you to continue the conversation with us and the partner community on our Facebook page.
Increase your market value
We know that the greatest asset of any company is its workforce. A well-trained, highly skilled, and nimble workforce is critical, especially in today’s fast-changing technology industry, and our old ways of training just aren’t keeping up. So this year, we’re streamlining and improving our training, certification, exam delivery, and performance tracking.
Training. To improve your experience and provide training to you on your own terms, we’re consolidating all partner training into the Microsoft Virtual Academy and engaging students with Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) to provide hands on, experiential learning at scale.
Certification. We know the current certification process is not agile enough for today’s pace of technology change, so we’re complementing certification with skills badging - a lightweight and low-friction way to encourage continuous learning through earlier, more reachable milestones. We will be piloting in our first half and staging rollout in our second half of the year.
Exams. To save you more time, we’re expanding availability of Online Proctored Exams so you no longer have to travel to a testing center.
Tracking. We’ve heard from you that tracking unique MCPs by competency created a lot of unnecessary overhead. We agree so we are planning to eliminate this requirement in the fall and are turning our attention to performance outcomes instead. With the rich, detailed information provided on our new dashboards at the MPN portal, you can now track your progress and your customer’s consumption to easily determine where to focus your efforts.
Activate. Finally, using our products within your own organization can help drive up your sales volume by up to 3 times so we are investing to help you easily migrate to O365 through our continued partnership with SkyKick and we are increasing the Azure Service credits and giving you access to Visual Studio Enterprise edition as part of your cloud competency IURs.
Amplify your market impact
In our evolving market, meeting the demands of a modern customer means effectively using digital marketing. We know that creating impactful marketing can be a challenge, especially for partners that have limited people and resources. We are taking action to help make it easier for you to find success by marketing a way that will work best for you with resources that we offer. We’ll do this in the following ways:
Share best practices in digital marketing from some of our most successful cloud partners packaged into prescriptive guidance that helps you determine the right marketing tactics and materials based on where your company is at in its lifecycle and resource capacity.
Offer a packaged set of digital marketing services through a program called Digital Stride, which helps you improve your online presence through search engine optimization, optimize your online presence and Pinpoint profile
Offering you BING search credits to expand your search engine marketing
While we will continue to innovate on our own digital marketing with product, industry, vertical and audience based marketing to drive customer demand and air cover, we heard from you that navigating the complexity of how to participate was overwhelming. To help you more easily participate in our customer campaigns we have selected a single, broad based customer campaign to go to market with our partners this year: “Modern Biz.” This single campaign is anchored on the four customer scenarios to show your customers how to grow their business and help you to maximize each socket that you sell and deploy. Providing you with guidance on how to optimize your own partner profitability within those same customer scenarios.
As part of our own marketing efforts we are highlighting to our customers the impact that working with a partner can have on their business. To showcase this we recently introduced a new initiative: Partner Stories. These stories focus on the customers you help, their challenges, and the successes they achieve with your support. They celebrate your innovation and creativity, and your dedication to solving your customers’ problems. We have published many new stories this week and have many more coming next year. We’re always looking for our next great story, so we encourage you to share yours with us in Connect.
Grow your market influence
Connecting with other partners can help you expand your reach, extend your services capability and build a channel within our Microsoft channel. We want to help you leverage each other so everyone can get to market faster, more efficiently, and more profitably. Some tools and resources I discussed today can make it easier for you to leverage the benefits of partnership:
The dynamic sourcing solution from Dynasource will help you share talent. Get to 100% staff utilization by sharing temporarily “benched” employees.
We’ve partnered with DevDraft to help you find talented developers who have the right skill set for your needs.
Find other partners to partner with through Pinpoint.
And of course, there are always the traditional partner community channels we sponsor for you to find partners with complementary business solutions, goals, and values: International Association of Microsoft Channel Partners (IAMCP), Women in Technology (WIT), the SMB PALs, ISV networking community, and more.
Working together can exponentially increase your business growth and success, so please take advantage of the online communities, and for those here at WPC, of this unique networking opportunity.
The State of Arizona consists of more than 130 federated government agencies and 32,000 employees, which serve more than 6 million residents. The organization decided to begin migrating its IT infrastructure to AWS after recognizing that more than half of its 2,600 servers were aging and needed to be replaced. During its first phase, the State of Arizona migrated its DNS solution to the AWS Cloud. By using AWS, the State now saves 75% in annual operating costs on its DNS solution when compared to its previous on-premises IT infrastructure.
The State of Arizona Runs its DNS Solution on AWS and Saves 75% Annually (3:31)
