Global satellite communications company gets a bird's-eye view of data migration to AWS

The challenge

Speedcast has multiple monitoring systems that collect data from all of its customers’ global devices. Until now, the data has all been fed into a single MySQL database, but the team soon faced a bigger challenge when it came to managing over 100GB of traffic each day. Speedcast used a legacy system to collect the relevant data and display it on the company portal. As Speedcast noted, “This prevented our customers from being able to perform basic tasks. The result was a large number of customers calling customer support to verify and confirm, wasting valuable time.” The company needed a new way to collect, store, analyse, and display the data in their system to improve the customer experience, make it easier for internal teams to manage, and gain a better understanding of external needs.

The solution

Speedcast’s infrastructure was primarily on-premises. This foundation project gave them the opportunity to reinvent themselves and move to the cloud, and the decision was made to migrate to Amazon Web Services (AWS). From the beginning, Claranet and Speedcast were committed to working as one combined team to achieve a rapid migration and then build cloud native capabilities. The company knew that data was the most valuable part of their business and Claranet had the right skills to work with the AWS infrastructure needed for the project. Early on, they delved into the infrastructure and data discovery phase, which is part of Claranet’s consulting competitive advantage. This gave the Speedcast team a clear view of the data they needed to migrate and manage, and a proof of concept (PoC) of what to do next.

The result

Speedcast now has its own data solution running on AWS billed through Claranet. This includes Claranet's CloudHealth FinOps services, along with enterprise-level support. Being fully managed by Claranet's AWS engineers, Speedcast now benefits from using a CloudOps service purpose-built for cloud-native workloads.

To date, data has been designed to be collected:

• From enterprise monitoring platforms from Service Now and Speedcast, to a tailored combination of AWS services such as:
  • Lambda, Kinesis and Glue (eventually making its way to Redshift to work)
  • Business solution for reporting
  • Athena for historical data thanks to an S3 datalake, so it is still available but has no impact on the portal performance

The next steps will be to expand this offering to add new customer insights and begin to understand what will happen next for the Speedcast project.

Speedcast added: “Claranet’s close collaboration with our IT engineers was key to the success of the project. They brought value and expertise to the table, actively listening to understand our specific challenges and address needs. Highly recommended.”

[Claranet] brought value and expertise to the table, really listened to understand our specific challenges and address needs. Highly recommended.

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