Modernizing Election Coverage: How Edison Research Saved $1m with Hybrid Cloud Migration

Problem 

An on premise dual geo regional system needed continuous capital expenditure for enhancing a legacy system used for near real-time analytics for media coverage of US elections. The system is for live media coverage so the RPO (recovery point objective) was zero data loss and the RTO (recovery time objective) was less than five minutes if there was a major outage. The system had to be purchased for max capacity to cover presidential elections and was under utilized for smaller events and was not used at all when there were no elections. In addition, any innovations or experiments had to be done within the limitations of whatever hardware was in place.  When it came time to upgrade the system, the costs were prohibitive for the value that was being provided and other options had to be explored.  

Solution 

The NEP was not ready to move 100% to the public cloud. ThorTech worked with the National Election Pool to architect a hybrid system that allowed them to ease into utilizing the public cloud and start to take advantage of the ‘pay for what you use’ model. A small on-premise footprint remained in place and the rest of the workloads for the application was moved to AWS.  

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.