Ascential Group Case Study

Planning and implementation of storage migration to AWS delivers outstanding business efficiencies for Ascential Group.

About Ascential

Ascential Group enables smart decision-making for the world’s most ambitious businesses. In an increasingly complex, digitally-driven world, we help the world’s top consumer product and service companies understand what’s important and how to act on it – today, and in the future.

Customer comment

transACT has been our trusted go to cloud partner for several years. Working closely with us on our architectures, storage projects and providing subject matter experts alongside AWS we have successfully implemented a S3 Parc program which has allowed us to benefit from impressive cost optimisations against our monthly spend with no changes to our environment.

Sean Harley, EVP & CIO,
Ascential

Business challenges

There was a mixture of on-premise storage technologies such as Commvault media and tape utilising types, but with numerous challenges with legacy systems, licensing, data duplication and capacity; all contributing towards escalating hardware costs to maintain which being a Cloud First Business they were looking to have all workloads based in AWS to allow scalability across the different brands globally.

transACT have been advising Ascential on the Cloud Journey for a few years in coordination with the business stakeholders who have a cloud first motto and having completed many projects alongside Ascential to migrate workloads into AWS this was a natural step to have all data located in one location due to the nature of the big data business model.

Working together

A discovery and assessment demonstrated tangible ROI using cloud services rather than repeatedly investing in on-premise hardware. This was calculated based on previous yearly costs, the team working with AWS account manager were able to provide a highly available, cost-effective, pay as you go solution where the customer could excel and build analytics to release the value of the data globally.

transACT designed and implemented a full data migration plan, including monthly calculator breakdown to implement AWS storage services to migrate data to S3 in a multi-part upload of over 500tb of block and File storage. In the interim, in conjunction with Ascential, transACT implemented the storage gateway to ensure all data would be satisfactorily migrated to AWS.

For the bulk of the storage migration transACT used their internal streamline process which restored the data and migrated utilising AWS Snowball, AWS CLI for priority data using staging instances at their ISO 27001 location.

Business benefits

Data
availability

Database
security

Cost
savings

Technology stacks

AWS Snowball

Amazon S3

Amazon S3 Glacier

Amazon EC2

Amazon EBS

Outcomes

Following a successful Data to Cloud Migration, a large quantity of data would be within S3, with a majority of this data not required to be accessible instantly, an S3 Lifecycle Management Solution was implemented to S3 Glacier. Utilising this storage tier reduced costs for data with S3 but provided a blueprint for archival data moving forward.

This solution was proposed to be implemented for back-ups and restores of workloads already within AWS. This lifecycle management saw savings up to 18% on their storage monthly storage costs.

Next steps

Book a call with one of our cloud specialists who can provide further detail on the assessment and deliverables.