Headquartered in Georgia, in the United States, eBOARDsolutions is an Information Technology and Services company with customers worldwide.
eBOARDsolutions provides a software product called Simbli Board Management, which is used by various boards to maximize productivity. eBOARDsolutions is well-known for its deep understanding of its customers and is on a mission to help alleviate the pressures they face, by keeping board members organized, laser-focused, and incredibly aligned.
An Infrastructure Modernization Design to Support the Company Growth Objectives
eBOARDsolutions needed to modernize its digital platforms that were becoming outdated. The company was relying on a private cloud platform that, while successful so far, required a lot of the team's time and resources to manage. Without upgrading, availability and reliability would suffer, and there was risk of an outage since disaster recovery plans were inadequate. Such an outage could critically impact the business.
As they looked to transform their digital estate, they encountered several business challenges, including:
eBOARDsolutions was concerned about governance and control over Azure spending.
Existing database tuning and optimization issues needed addressing.
eBOARDsolutions had limited Azure expertise in-house.
eBOARDsolutions leadership expected enhanced performance and cost savings from the Azure migration.
eBOARDsolutions was working to a tight timeline and needed to complete the modernization within a 7-week period.
As a trusted partner of over 5 years, eBOARDsolutions turned to Aptum to help transform its digital environment to support continued expansion and growth. With the history of the relationship, eBOARDsolutions knew that Aptum had consistently delivered above and beyond for them over the years and wanted to leverage the existing relations and the technical expertise of the team to support this modernization.
By openly discussing these challenges from the outset, Aptum and eBOARDsolutions could collaborate to deliver a solution that met strategic business goals. Aptum's technical experience helped guide key architectural decisions to maximize value, and their trusted partnership-built confidence that the teams could tackle any obstacle in close alignment.
After conducting an initial audit of the environment, it was decided that the best approach for eBOARDsolutions would be to migrate the environment to a Microsoft Azure Cloud architecture. EBOARDsolutions was already running Office 365 and Exchange server, so there was an opportunity to take advantage of the dynamic resources available in the cloud.
To do this, Aptum leveraged its technical expertise to guide eBOARDsolutions through a successful migration to Azure. This included:
Firstly, Aptum’s Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) was brought into play to fully understand eBOARDsolutions motivations and desired outcomes of migrating to cloud. This allowed a comprehensive cloud strategy and plan to be defined, and an actionable plan put in place to ensure the readiness of people, processes, and governance for the adoption of new technical capabilities.
Aptum seamlessness designed and built a new Azure Managed Services environment (landing zone) and conducted a migration with our Professional services team to move their databases from an Aptum private cloud to Azure Managed Instances. This included rehosting Windows servers on Azure IaaS as well as rehosting MS SQL on Azure IaaS.
eBOARDsolutions has chosen Aptum to manage their environment on an ongoing basis. They have opted for our Managed and Support Services – to benefit from a host of services that will keep every aspect of their environment maximized.
Azure Compute Services (IaaS)
Azure Database Services
Microsoft Windows Server
Microsoft MS SQL Servers
Microsoft IIS
Microsoft .NET
Azure DevOps for IaC
Azure Network Services
Azure Storage Services
By migrating to Azure, eBOARDsolutions unlocked major benefits while also mitigating their earlier concerns:
Aptum enabled a smooth transition from Aptum’s hosting to the versatility and agility of Azure. The customer was also provided with database management support with contract portability from a hosted environment to Azure without penalty.
Azure empowers better cost management through right-sized resources and scaling. Hosting applications and infrastructure in Azure has allowed eBOARDsolutions to better manage their costs as they are no longer dealing with HW lifecycle management and planning.
eBOARDsolutions is now able to spend more time on value-adding work. eBOARDsolutions can offload more responsibility to Aptum by leveraging Aptum Premium managed services.
Azure resolved database performance concerns and boosted accessibility to data.
The team saved time and refocused on high-value initiatives rather than maintenance. A hub & spoke architecture was implemented, which segregates the workloads based on their usage and can be efficiently used for budgetary policies. It overall reduces human oversight if the governance is in place.
Granular controls safeguarded IP and managed access between developer levels.