AWS

Best Practice

SaaS in The Cloud

14 January 2020

Innovation, elasticity and availability are only some of the advantages that adoption of a SaaS model brings to the business. SaaS makes possible, also for small companies, to reach a broad range of geographies making market possibilities limitless.

Storm Reply supports its customers into the journey to adopt a SaaS model on AWS with a consolidated approach, years of experience and strongest AWS knowledge in the market.

The advantages

Analysts from Forrester Research estimated the average market value growth more than 50% annually and forecast that it will continue to grow in 2020. It comes as no surprise that the SaaS market is expanding rapidly. This type of business model has plenty of advantages that attract customers to follow this software distribution model.

Innovation

The breadth and depth of tools and services available on Cloud can facilitate a faster time-to-market for SaaS providers. The pace of innovation in Cloud providers also provides SaaS companies with new services and capabilities to enhance the features, cost, and management profile of their solutions.

Pay for Use Pricing

Managing and optimizing costs is essential to SaaS environments. With the elasticity of a Cloud environment, you’re able to build SaaS solutions that are optimized to match the infrastructure of your multi-tenant load.

Scale and Availability

Uptime and the ability to respond to continually evolving workloads is essential to SaaS products. Cloud providers provide a broad range of capabilities that can be leveraged to align with the uptime requirements of SaaS environments. It also provides dynamic scaling mechanisms that allow you to align tenant consumption with actual load.

Global Reach

SaaS providers often need to reach customers in a broad range of geographies. The availability of principal Cloud providers in all the principal geographic regions makes easy for the businesses to tearing down the wall of geographic distances.

Approach

Storm Reply is committed to help accelerating customer cloud journey with its expertise and strong competence in AWS.

Storm Reply advises several customers to design and implement a SaaS platform on AWS.

These are three points that distinguish our approach:

saas-approach.png 0

Advisory

Re-Architecting and Re-Factoring applications to scale on AWS. Typical approach involves cloud native technologies such as Microservices, auto-scaling and managed services. Storm Reply helps customers to familiarize with the entire portfolio of AWS services and couch them to get a strong Cloud governance.

Automation and DevOps methodologies

To manage the creation, update and governance of all the components that compose the customer portfolio, Storm Reply introduces the customer to use automation. Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Continuous Integration and Delivery (CI/CD), automate config management are pillars that are used from the day one in any project.

Cloud Management

If needed, Storm Reply provides 24x7 Managed Services on top of Cloud Services: System Monitoring, Security Monitoring, System Management, Patch & Change Management. Moreover Storm Reply will continuously optimize the cost of the Cloud infrastructure based on metrics collected monthly to get the right performance at the lowest price.

References

INFOCERT

saas-infocert.png 1

Key fact

  • Infocert sells Trusted Digital Services, like LegalMail, LegalInvoice, PEC, Digital certificates, etc
  • Infocert owns two DC in Italy and is known by customers for data security and stong trust
  • Some issues in the last months with Business Continuity
  • DevOps approach and use of automation in development teams
  • Fear of vendor Lock-in and mistrust of Cloud services
  • Strong commercial Presence from SW vendors

Challenges

  • First Cloud Project for customer
  • High Availability requirements and very low RPO and RTO
  • Lot of Effort to train and advisor the development teams
  • High Pressure from end Customers on cloud transformation

Solution

  • Use of Kubernetes (EKS) to prevent from Lock-In
  • Use of Managed Services to shorten time to market
  • Quick win project to entrust Cloud services and Partner
  • Complex network and security Design to enhance security and cost controlling
  • Side-by-side work with development teams and key stakeholders to create trust with the partner and the cloud provider
  • 5 core applications migrated in EKS
  • High-security services migrated in AWS (OCSP, CRL), using Cloud HSM

Docsity

saas-docsity.png 2

key fact

  • Docsity is a company that sells study material online
  • The company is digitally transforming to capture opportunities in terms of elasticity, availability and to reduce costs
  • The company use CI/CD and automation to integrate continuously new features
  • The platform is now full cloud
  • The platform availability has been improved and the overall cost has been reduced of 30%

Challenges

  • Deploy new services and features
  • High Availability for a Multi-Regional Platform
  • End Users constraint in terms of latency sensitivity

Solutions

  • Reply has been chosen as partner for Advisory and Migration and AWS as cloud provider
  • Infrastructure and Software Automation, using native services and open source technologies
  • Cost control and internal billing process based on Big Data services and custom solution