Mondaq
“Working with Ubertas has been an excellent experience. We have found them to be highly professional, diligent, detailed and concise. They got to understand our set up very well and really grasped how our business and its systems and processes functioned. They were both technically excellent but also commercially aware of the things that mattered to us from a day-to-day business perspective. We felt entirely confident in their technical abilities which meant we were comfortable in opening our systems to them with unrestricted access.“
Andrew Partridge, CEO at Mondaq
About Mondaq
Mondaq is an intelligent syndication platform providing world class content and insights from professional services firms.
Bringing a different model to the market, Mondaq believes that senior decision-makers “seek” knowledge and insight when they need it, from reliable and highly regarded online resources, as well as information being delivered to their inbox.
Recent developments in A.I. (and the addition of an in-house Data Science team) have enabled Mondaq to further improve content delivery to the right audience, at the right time, supported by strong partnerships with leading online resources (including subscription-only services such as Dow Jones, Bloomberg, WestLaw).
The Challenge
Mondaq were hosting their customer facing websites and services on AWS following a quick self-migration from a previous datacenter. This was performed as a direct lift and shift, consisting mainly of EC2 instances.
After completing this migration, Mondaq were connected to Ubertas Consulting by AWS to receive additional guidance in modernising and future-proofing the platform in order to increase security, operational resilience, data flexibility, and cost optimisation.
With an ever-growing customer base of over 1M registered users publishing more than 500k articles and videos (generating page views exceeding 7M a month, 85M+ annually), and the formation of an in-house Data Science team, Mondaq’s main motivation was centred on migrating their underpinning SQL data layer on EC2 into AWS managed services.
As part of the brief, all aspects of both their AWS Cloud environment, and the way in which Mondaq’s operations and development teams utilised the platform, were considered. This brought into focus a range of Cloud native concepts, technologies and services available on AWS.
The Approach
Following an initial Well-Architected Framework Review of Mondaq’s Current State AWS environment and associated code, with consideration given to future customer requirements, Ubertas Consulting mapped out an infrastructure to provide the same services at minimum cost, with sufficient resilience and ease of maintenance.
The planning phase commenced as part of a Modernisation Viability Assessment. This produced a set of designs steps, comprising the project delivery as follows:
- Taking all dependencies and requirements gathered within the assessment phase, Ubertas created a step-by-step migration plan document that identified all the actions to be carried out in sequential order, and which individual(s) were responsible for each of those actions. This document helped all parties align on their responsibilities, provided visibility and helped the migration to proceed seamlessly with minimal disruption to the end-users.
- Creating a multi-account structure using AWS Organizations, utilising services like Security, Hub, GuardDuty, and SSO to help automate security posture.
- Migrating all application servers from a public to private VPCs to increase security, and performing right sizing analysis for cost optimisation. The latter was also applied in the adoption of the cloud-native service AWS RDS running Microsoft SQL (when migrating away from EC2 instances hosting the data layer).
The Result
Mondaq’s engagement with Ubertas Consulting resulted in their AWS environment becoming Well-Architected, aligning with best practice and leveraging cloud-native automation.
Where Mondaq previously relied heavily on Provisioned IOPS storage on EC2, adoption of cloud-native services eliminated this need. RDS ensures that all databases are managed, backed-up and scalable; CloudWatch dashboards provide vital operational information and AWS Back-Up always ensures protection of data assets.
The engagement also helped Mondaq achieve a greater understanding of AWS and recognise its potential to make their environment even more scalable and cloud-native when looking ahead to future AI and big data projects.
AWS Well-Architected Framework Partner Program
When designing and building Cloud platforms on AWS, customers can benefit from the best practices driven from thousands of deployments across and embodied in the Well-Architected Framework. Aligning to the Well-Architected Framework often starts with a review and Ubertas Consulting provides this service to customers at zero cost/charge as part of our commitment to the program.
Why Ubertas Consulting
Ubertas Consulting is a Cloud consultancy specialising in Amazon Web Services.
As an Advanced Partner, AWS Channel Reseller (Solution Provider Program) and Well-Architected Framework Program Partner, our mission is to assist customers utilise the AWS Cloud in a way that aligns to best practice.
Our consultancy services span the breadth of AWS technologies and range from advisory through to full implementation as we assist customers in applying the foundations of Well-Architected to migrate and operate their mission critical workloads in the Cloud.
To find out more about Ubertas Consulting and take your next steps to being Well-Architected, get in touch via the form below. We’d love to help.