Learn how BSH drastically reduced its cloud setup time from weeks to hours by implementing Container8, significantly enhancing operational efficiency and innovation. This transformative change not only streamlined IT processes but also elevated productivity and satisfaction among cloud users and engineers.
For our client, the intranet is one of the most important communication channels with all employees worldwide. It is essential for the corporate communications department to be able to reach all employees at the same time and inform them about important topics at any time. In turn, the infrastructure and development team must ensure that the system is available 24/7/365.
The responsible IT team manages and oversees the internal and external communication technologies. It ensures that these technologies are secure and reliable and meet the requirements of your organization.
One of their most important products is the intranet. It enables her colleagues to read the latest news, access important tools and keep up to date with their colleagues.
The intranet has a direct influence on the daily work of our customer’s employees and represents a core system for the entire company. It must therefore always be available, even under high load or in the event of system errors.
Our customer’s Confluence intranet originally ran in a self-managed data center. The company was experiencing downtime, performance limitations and slow loading times with a high data flow. struggle. This prompted the senior IT team to rethink its approach to hosting the intranet in self-managed data centers.
For example, when the CEO published important news, this led to a surge in access by employees worldwide. The result was a system failure.
To overcome these challenges, they implemented an AWS cloud infrastructure solution (Container8). This enabled them to minimize downtime, increase infrastructure performance and reduce load times.
Although the intranet is well developed, there were frequent outages that negatively impacted the employee user experience (UX). The intranet team realized that the infrastructure could not handle the load of high traffic, leading to frequent outages and impacting business results.
A survey by Statista found that downtime of core business systems can cost companies up to 5 million dollars per hour.
This led to frustration among employees and forced corporate communications teams to resort to alternative communication methods such as email.
Security breaches can have a direct impact on business results. It is therefore important to quickly mitigate the risks of potential security breaches.
But even if you do identify security risks, does your IT team have the time to solve them as it diverts resources from other important tasks?
The intranet infrastructure team faced similar challenges as more specialists were needed to identify and resolve security risks.
It was also unclear whether certain security gaps had been properly closed, which led to frustration within the team.
Migrating an existing application to the cloud is associated with technical and bureaucratic challenges. The intranet team faced similar obstacles: It had to convince other stakeholders to adopt a new approach and grapple with established project models.
To summarize, the team needed support with several challenges related to their intranet. Starting with frequent system failures, through to security aspects and migration hurdles.
To overcome the above-mentioned hurdles, the IT team responsible for the intranet infrastructure implemented solutions to optimize system availability, security and performance.
To address the availability, security and performance issues, they developed and used pre-configured, customizable and well-structured AWS templates. In addition to a feature to automate the creation of AWS org. accounts, they relied on auto-scaling cloud infrastructure, self-healing and security-by-design templates.
Automatically scaling cloud infrastructure templates
The customer’s digital products and services require high-performance functionality, and the use of the autoscaling template ensures exactly that. In relation to the intranet, it enables the automatic adjustment of the infrastructure size in AWS, depending on the access rate and load.
By scaling the number of servers, storage or bandwidth as required, the infrastructure can now handle any level of traffic or demand without performance issues, providing users with a consistently excellent experience.
“When our CEO recently published important news on the intranet, our autoscaling templates quickly responded to the increased traffic by adding more servers and bandwidth. This prevented a system outage and ensured that all employees could access the information they needed.”
When demand decreased, the infrastructure was scaled to its original size. This led to optimized performance and minimized costs.
The self-healing infrastructure of the intranet guarantees high infrastructure availability. The use of self-healing templates means that data traffic and servers are constantly monitored, i.e. if a server crashes, it is automatically restarted without the need for manual intervention.
With regard to redundancy, the intranet uses a so-called blue-green deployment, which ensures that two identical environments are always available. In the event of a failure of the live system, all traffic is redirected to the redundant system and automatically scaled to handle the traffic, ensuring business continuity during troubleshooting.
The result is a highly resilient and available system with minimal manual intervention, reducing the burden on the infrastructure team. In addition, everyone involved can be sure that the intranet’s self-healing infrastructure ensures smooth operation and thus provides a reliable platform.
It is more important than ever to ensure the highest level of security in any cloud infrastructure.
The AWS cloud infrastructure solution (Container8) of our customer was developed with this in mind; therefore, each template was created with integrated security guidelines.
The templates are curated and verified, ready for anyone to use and fully compliant with the company’s security requirements and policies.
With Security by Design, intranet developers no longer have to think about security, as they receive it automatically via their templates. This saves time and resources and at the same time gives them the certainty that the intranet infrastructure is secure.
In addition, security is integrated directly into the creation of the AWS org. account to ensure that each account is secure. This is made available to every developer with the help of an implemented Developer Self Service Desk and the account creation is automated.
There were often system failures when many people accessed the intranet, for example because there was news from the CEO. To avoid this, an e-mail was then sent to the employees with the intranet article. This meant that everyone could read it when they wanted and the system didn’t break down. But of course this is not a long-term solution.
The implemented Developer Self Service and the infrastructure templates delivered remarkable results for the intranet infrastructure, the intranet users and the infrastructure team.
The team can now
They could also uncover security vulnerabilities more quickly and relieve developers so that they can concentrate on important tasks.
Overall, Container8 has improved infrastructure, performance, security and resource utilization.
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