From Hybrid to 100% Cloud: How National Election Pool Reduced Costs and Expanded Business with SaaS

Problem 

An organization that migrated from an 100% on-premise system to a hybrid system had to upgrade the on-premise hardware that had reached end of life. After saving seven figures moving to a hybrid system and enjoying the benefits of being able to pay only for what they used on AWS, they decided to compare the costs of moving forward with the upgrade of the on-premise hardware or shift to be 100% in the cloud.  The other driving factor was in order to be competitive, they needed to provide a SaaS offering for their customers to bring in new business.  This introduced some additional challenges that the fixed nature of purchasing hardware did not fit well with where the business wanted to go.

Solution 

ThorTech worked with the National Election Pool to create a migration plan to move the hybrid system to 100% AWS.  A SaaS architecture was also put into place and support software built to enable the NEP to provide new products into the marketplace and expand their reach.  

Outcome 

The dual region hybrid environment provided the same level of private network connectivity they had in the past plus the flexibility of reducing cost considerably when not being used and for smaller events.  This resulted in considerable cost savings of over $1m over the alternative on-premise model. In addition, it opened up the ability to scale services up and down as needed and do experiments which were not possible with the previous infrastructure.

Technologies 

• AWS Direct Connect
• AWS API Gateway

Client Information 

Industry 

• Media