MPS is in the process of rewriting its IT strategy using Cloud technology. The publishing solutions provider aspires to attain cost efficiency by using Amazon Web Services’ modular pricing. By Heena Jhingan
MPS is a known name in the publishing space that provides a variety of content transformation, content development, creative design and software services to international publishers, media companies and large enterprises. With a global presence and over 30 years of offshore experience, MPS is now on a roll to adapt to the changing needs of the digital convergence revolution.
The company had earlier rented server space with a hosting provider, however with its growing operations, the hosting provider was unable to deliver the desired SLAs around application up time and response time to users. Also, the company’s own on-premise servers were aging and and inching closer to obsolescence.
Arun Goyal, Senior Vice President & Head IT, MPS explained that the need to replace the old servers, prompted them to analyze the overall costs of hardware, software, hosting contract fee and SLA expectations from their customers. “We realised that the hosting contract and the hardware servers were no longer viable in meeting our business requirements. So, we decided that the Cloud is going to be the new word for IT strategy for MPS,” Goyal said.
While MPS evaluated various options for their IT infrastructure, their primary concerns were related to cost control and manageability. Before choosing Amazon Web Services as its cloud platform, MPS conducted several proofs of concept of other options. Goyal opined that none of the other solution providers could match the agility, security, cost benefits and performance of Amazon Web Service (AWS) that was required by a publishing solution provider like them.
The Cloud chapter
According to Goyal, moving to AWS early this year has been beneficial for MPS. The implementation has eliminated all the capex, bringing it down to zero. MPS expects to save at least $ 150,000 per year in both capital and operating expenses as now they no longer get into the hassles of negotiating hosting contracts, hardware, OS, depreciation and maintenance of hardware infrastructure. In addition to eliminating the capital expenses, MPS’s operating expenses have also reduced by 20%. Goyal claimed that the system now experiences greater efficiency and cost effectiveness by reserving the Amazon Elastic Compute (AWS EC2) called the Reserved Instances capacity for a longer period of time.
Goyal explained, “We can reserve the AWS EC2 capacity for 1 to 3 years for a low reservation fee, and in return we pay a much lower EC2 price per hour for the Reserved Instances as compared to a normal On-Demand Instance (or as you say, unreserved). With the various pricing choices that AWS offers, we can select the option that best meets our business requirement. In addition, we can also sell the Reserved Instance of Amazon EC2 in AWS’s recently announced “Reserved Instance Marketplace”, which is a platform for customers to save even more costs.”
Moreover, the new service gave MPS, the flexibility of scaling up or down the infrastructure resources as per their business requirements. One thing that makes Goyal the happiest about the implementation is the fact that his IT team no longer needs to be involved in the procurement, installation, testing and maintenance of hardware infrastructure, etc. The IT team can, instead work more constructively to serve the company’s new initiatives and customer services. “With AWS, we can now easily use the multiple Availability Zones in the AWS US East Region for our production workloads, ensuring high resilience of our services for our customers and employees. This is an important IT initiative and AWS provides us the immediate tools that we can use to accelerate our business continuity planning initiative,” Goyal said, adding that migration to the Amazon cloud platform was challenging, yet educating process.
Across the learning curve
While deploying any new technology, there is always an initial learning curve. However, to make this learning curve short, MPS team worked closely with the AWS team who provided them with guidance on the best practices in using the Cloud. “We experimented with technology services and tools of AWS to familiarise ourselves with it. Cloud computing is still fairly new and there are not many people in India who are equipped with the right kind of expertise we were looking for. In the past, we used a vendor that does not have the right expertise, and that resulted in doubling the work and a lot of financial costs borne by us. However, as soon as we decided to get direct support from AWS, we were able to get guidance of the tools required to optimize processes and this has given us the desired results,” Goyal said. MPS now has more than 60 important web assets that they run in production to serve both their customers their own employees.
At present, MPS has migrated a part of its data centre to the AWS Cloud, and some of it production servers are still hosted internally. They will be moving them to the AWS Cloud in phases by running proof-of-concepts, conducting further cost benefit analysis and planning a migration strategy. Goyal concluded by saying that they were discussing their next IT implemen -tation phase on AWS Cloud to reap more benefits.
