Not-for-profit organisation

Versent was engaged through a competitive process to assist a not-for-profit organisation “The Customer” stabilise and uplift their digital channels with the use of AWS capabilities in unison with Versent’s Modern Run services. The not-for-profit organisation provides digital content for it’s consumers which at times sees high demand and has high visibility to the public and to those who fund it.

The Customer required a proactive and modern service management team to prevent and improve uptime of its public facing digital content. The traffic volumes for the site are not consistent and the peak periods are orders of magnitude higher than steady business as usual volumes. The Customer was experiencing frequent outages during high volume periods and occasionally during business as usual activities. The outages were causing public perception issues and having an effect on the overall usage and patronage of their services, which are unique. If the outage and performance issues were not resolved then this may have led to funding challenges from the internal bodies sponsoring this platform and service. Additionally, The Customer had aspirations to uplift their digital content and engagement model through these platforms and could not do so on an environment that was encumbered with technical availability, scaling challenges and possible security gaps.

Versent Modern Run were engaged and subsequently started a treatment plan to firstly tackle the outage problems, then the scaling issues for peak demand. Our team implemented AWS Cloud Watch alarms and logging to ensure all critical events that required treatment were captured and an appropriate notification to the run team created. This was completed inside the first four weeks and it had an immediate impact on the restoration time of the outages.

Secondly our Versent Modern Run team went to work on improving the availability through peak demand as well as performance. Our team leveraged AWS’s Content Delivery Network (CDN) solution to distribute content globally and increase performance. Once implemented our team fine-tuned this solution over a period of 3-4 weeks.

After stabilising and improving the performance of the services, our team then implemented several native AWS services to uplift SSL certificate handling, security groups and importantly a dedicated DDoS protection via AWS Shield.

The Versent Modern Run team now support the environment end to end have met all SLAs required since the uplift, achieving high praise for The Customer about the overall change in experience for them as a customer and it’s consumers.

Using AWS tools such as CloudWatch, Shield, CDN and many others we have achieved the following for The Customer:

Performance Improvements: Noticeable increases in website speed and page load times by over 120%, improving user experience and boosting search engine visibility.
Unparalleled Stability: Significant reduction in downtime (sometimes eight per month to zero), ensuring consistent accessibility for visitors worldwide.
Optimized Resource Allocation: Resource scaling aligned with traffic demands, maximizing efficiency and budget utilization and overall reducing infrastructure costs by 12%.
Bolstered Security: Multi-layered security safeguards and continuous monitoring protect platform and visitor data.
Environmental Responsibility: Reduced carbon emissions through optimized infrastructure.

Versent is a born in the cloud organisation and has uplifted and maintained its customers environments continuously over the last 9 years. It has one of the highest number of AWS accreditations, including the AWS MSP certification, which was a key selling point when we approach The Customer detailed in the case study.