The Challenge
Reliable Hardware That Still Meant Occasional Downtime
The organization ran a Citrix environment hosted in a local data center. The servers were well maintained and over-provisioned to help ensure a high level of availability, but the environment still had occasional downtime because of the physical hardware itself.
When it came time to replace that hardware, the organization had a choice: buy new on-premises equipment, or rethink the environment entirely.
The Approach
Migrate, Rather Than Replace
Instead of purchasing new hardware to replace what was aging out, ECS proposed migrating the environment to AWS—removing the physical hardware as a point of failure altogether and building in redundancy from the ground up.
The Solution
A Highly Available, Self-Healing AWS Environment
ECS migrated the environment into AWS across two Availability Zones, with backend servers and databases mirrored between them so a failure in one zone doesn't take down the environment. A Lambda function monitors the environment and automatically triggers failover to the standby zone, and autoscaling alerts flag capacity needs before they become a problem.
The Outcome
Fewer IT Issues, More Capital for Growth
The result was a much smoother experience for the organization. ECS recorded a drop in lost productivity from IT issues of 75%—and the organization retained hundreds of thousands of dollars that would otherwise have been tied up in capital expenses for new hardware. Instead, they were able to put those funds toward company growth.