Highlights

• 50% reduction in costs associated with data storage, archival, and management/
• Reduced the manual effort and time spent on data storage and retrieval workflows by 70%.
• Delivered a performant and optimal data storage solution based on Amazon S3, EBS, and EC2.
• Migrated the old product catalogs and live marketing campaign data to AWS.
• Migrated the existing admin portal for uploading and downloading data securely to a new cloud provider.

Overview

Envogue Furnishings is a $5m home furnishings and decor enterprise based out of Noida, they offer high-end items for creating picturesque spaces. They import items from multiple markets in Asia, Europe, and Africa, and leverage high-resolution media to market its products to end customers. They currently use on-prem storage devices to archive, store, and retrieve media formats like rich images, presentations, banners, SQL databases, and other marketing collateral.

Requirements

They were finding it challenging to effectively manage the high volume of data on their physical storage devices. Data management was becoming expensive and made data storage and retrieval workflows time-consuming. Moreover, managing backups to prevent data loss was also becoming difficult due to the high cost of external storage devices.

Key objectives:

1. Deliver a long-term data storage solution that lowers the cost of data storage and makes data management workflows more efficient.

2. Migrate the existing data to the new storage solution and move the admin portal to a new cloud provider to enhance the response times and lower costs.  

3. Ensure that the data storage solution is secure, recoverable, and auditable, and can be easily accessed through the admin portal.

Solution

Envogue engaged Velocis to build a cloud storage solution and to migrate their existing data and portal application to the new solution. Velocis deployed a competent team of AWS-certified cloud engineers to architect and implement an optimal storage solution based on AWS. Following this, the Velocis teams migrated the existing data and the admin portal to the AWS cloud.

Here are the key highlights of the deployed solution:

1. Categorized and segmented the old and current data to be migrated to the cloud storage solution. The old data was migrated to the cheaper Amazon S3 Glacier cold storage class as it was accessed infrequently by the client’s marketing teams. The data associated with live marketing campaigns was moved to the standard S3 class.

2. Migrated the admin portal to AWS, to host it on the latest-gen M5 general-purpose EC2 instance for Windows. The admin portal is integrated into the Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), which ensures the encryption of data at rest.  

3. Configured backup and disaster recovery settings for the cloud storage solution, and architected monitoring, security, and audit mechanisms for the solution. Monitoring is powered by Amazon CloudWatch, and data security is implemented with AWS Security Hub, Amazon GuardDuty, and Security Hub.  

Business outcomes

The cloud storage solution enabled Envogue to mitigate the costs associated with the physical storage devices and made the data management workflows more efficient. Here are the key benefits realized through this solution:

1. S3’s cold storage class for data archival, and the standard storage for live marketing data lowered the overall cost of data storage by 50%.

2. The new cloud storage solution, accessed through the AWS-hosted admin portal application, reduced the time spent on data storage, retrieval, and management by 70%.

3. The new admin portal is more intuitive and responsive, which has significantly improved the user experience for marketing and sales teams.

4. Identified optimization opportunities that can be realised in the future roadmap of the solution. These include the shift from current EBS gp2 volumes to gp3 volumes, which offer 20% better price performance, implementation of Elastic Load Balancing for better traffic management, and migrating self-managed MySQL databases to Amazon RDS for improved performance and scalability.

‍