SalesSupport360 provides outsourced referral marketing services. A central element of their service offering is mining data of social media sites. SalesSupport360 is a de-centralized organization, with their data mining engineers and business development team located outside of the United States.
One of the major social media outlets, in effort to reduce malicious attacks, modified their access policies to deprioritize non-U.S based traffic to access user profiles. The policy change inadvertently crippled SalesSupport360’s ability to access the website and perform their data mining services. SalesSupport360 attempted to mitigate the access restrictions on their own by testing various hosted VPN and proxy services. However, none of the services could provide a stable, performance oriented solution. With Clients threatening to sever relations, SalesSupport360 was effectively inoperable, unable to deliver on its promises and facing the certainty of shutting down its business.
SalesSuport360 contacted V2 Systems to see if there were any options left to resurrect their data mining services operation. By the time SalesSupport360 reached out, they had been unable to perform their service for 3 days. V2 Systems quickly assessed the critical restrictions affecting access, reviewed SalesSupport360’s own findings on attempts to resolve and offered an entirely different approach. Leveraging Amazon Web Services (AWS), V2 Systems designed and implemented a solution that put SalesSupport360 back into action in under 6 hours.
The solution, while simple, was only possible with AWS Elastic Computer Cloud (EC2) and AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). The Internet traffic needed to emanate from a United States based IP address to not get “picked up” by the access filters. However, the data research and business development teams were literally on the other side of the world. Since AWS allows the selection of regions, V2 Systems chose one of the US regions geographically closest to the research team to reduce network latency. The technology utilized was straight forward; Microsoft Windows Server 2012, Active Directory, Remote Desktop Services, RemoteApp and Amazon Linux.
Within hours of approval, V2 Systems created the core of the environment and provided access to critical members of the team to base-line the performance. Immediately seeing the ease of access and performance increase, SalesSupport360 approved the remainder of the deployment. The system was secured using a layered AWS VPC approach, VPC ACLs, VPC Security Groups, Remote Desktop Gateway though SSL and Windows Active Directory authenticated access. Backup and disaster recovery was accomplished through automated Elastic Block Storage (EBS) snapshots.
V2 Systems trained the SalesSupport360 IT staff on proper maintenance and user lifecycle management. Additionally, V2 Systems integrated AWS CloudWatch with its cloud-based monitoring and management platform to obtain real-time performance metrics and EC2 instance availability.
Ultimately, the cloud-based AWS RemoteApp solution saved SalesSupport360’s business. Taking full advantage of AWS to quickly design, deploy, secure, monitor, manage and maintain an offering provided SalesSupport360 with immediate results, a seamless hand-off and a cost-effective solution.
Further, should SalesSupport360’s mission or requirements change, the AWS solution is flexible in all directions, providing variable cost structure with minimal invested capital and no long term commitment.
