Migrating from On-Prem to the Cloud: a Business Success Story

Every day social media becomes an increasingly vital platform for e-commerce, not only driving awareness and sales, but allowing companies to monitor their traction with target demographics. According to Statista almost ninety-two percent of U.S. companies with more than 100 employees have incorporated social media into their overall marketing strategy. But for one mLogica customer, poised to exploit this exciting opportunity, their obsolescing technology nearly sunk them right at a pivotal moment.

The Customer was running a multi-media social sharing platform where users could exchange a wide variety of interactive content including texts, images, videos and more. Users could also interact with an array of online vendors and purchase through the Customer’s app.

A breakthrough technology, the platform also allowed the Customer’s clients to utilize its wealth of captured data to target users, identify their social media-browsing patterns and buying habits, then pitch products and services aligned with their individual shopping profiles. Leveraging such granular, near-real-time data allowed clients to successfully convert social media users into leads, and leads into buyers.

The problem? Just as they were poised to reap the profits of their innovative data technology, with a dramatic surge in user traffic and their client list likewise on the rise, the Customer experienced a sudden decline in app performance.

While a sudden influx of leads and buyers might sound like a great thing for any business, if the technology isn’t in place to handle that surge in incoming traffic-you’ve got a big problem.

In this case, the Customer’s database was unable to manage the sharp uptick in traffic due to the performance and scalability limitations of their existing on-premise database, causing critical logjams in application performance. Users became frustrated as they couldn’t access core app functionalities, which resulted in poor customer experience and squandered revenue opportunities.

Since their MongoDB on-premise database could not functionally provide what the Customer needed, their mandate was clear: it was time to migrate to the cloud. With a critical requirement for higher scalability and faster performance, the Customer chose Amazon Web Services EC2 as the target platform to host their database. They then selected mLogica’s expert team to drive the project.

Like any other migration, this journey to the cloud was filled with potential pitfalls. At first the Customer considered a “lift-and-shift” strategy to move their workloads to AWS EC2, thinking it would be an easier, faster means to migrate their business-critical workloads to the cloud.

But when mLogica came onboard and performed a comprehensive assessment of the existing database architecture, it was discovered the technological challenges the Customer faced were far more complex than they’d initially appeared. Roadblocks included the app’s server platform, Node.js, which was adversely impacting the system architecture and user-interface functions. The situation was further complicated by defective coding in the legacy database that had been created by previous developers.

With these unforeseen obstacles in their path, initially the Customer considered shelving their cloud migration plan. But it became clear there was no path forward if they couldn’t get a handle on their scalability and performance issues. As a business that derives its revenue from big data, the Customer understood very clearly the exponential growth rate of data worldwide. They realized secure, efficient cloud migration was the only route for their business survival.

Once we had a clear picture of the roadmap and challenges, which only a comprehensive initial technical assessment can provide, we were able to redesign the app’s code structure and integrate it on the new AWS EC2 platform. We also reconfigured the app’s social media integration to ensure current and future compatibility with all major social media platforms, for a seamless transition that freed the Customer from limitations on their speed, flexibility and growth.

Performance and scalability are key hallmarks of a premium e-commerce platform. Our Customer was not only able to gain immediate access to Amazon Web Services’ leading edge cloud technology to drive performance, but once on their AWS EC2 platform they were able to quickly scale capacity up and down in response to changes in demand. This included seasonal fluctuations and, crucially, sudden market changes, such as the virtually overnight shift to online purchasing at the onset of the worldwide COVID pandemic.

This migration made it possible for the Customer to focus on opportunities to grow their e-commerce business without any future concerns about customer volume and application performance.