Magnasoft Northstar is a provider of comprehensive, integrated child and school bus tracking and monitoring solution. The services enable children's safety and security when they travel to and from school.
During the beta phase, Magnasoft Northstar hosted and managed dedicated hardware on its own. But this had its own set of challenges in terms of increasing capex and inability to scale, which led to the adoption of cloud. The human resource thus freed were put to efficient use on advancing business and providing better quality of service and agility to customers at lower prices and become a force to reckon with amongst competition.
TECH DUE DILIGENCE
Before evaluating the solutions by different vendors, MagnaSoft NorthStar team laid down some parameters aimed at zeroing on the right and best solution available in the market. In the end it took the cloud plunge. It also created a roadmap and listed its expectations from the cloud roll out. The key considerations were:
- Scalability, maximum uptime, technology agnosticism, and no upfront investments
- The platform that is operating system, programming language, database and solution agnostic
- Minimum capex and operational costs
- Bigger return on investments and innovation
THE EUREKA MOMENT
After screening various solutions, the management identified that Amazon Web Services (AWS) as the right solution. According to company sources, the key considerations for choosing AWS were pricing, support, reliability, and technology agnosticism. AWS won on all parameters, with the cost-effective plan and a huge set of AMIs that helped to pick the right technology platform with ease.
"Moving to the AWS cloud platform, we have experienced savings of 40% versus renting or purchasing dedicated hardware and hosting it ourselves. We were also able to go to market 60% faster with our roll-outs. It enabled us to push out our new releases in a matter of a few hours down from three days," adds Kunal Ashar, Head of Product Development Division, Magnasoft Northstar. He further adds, "As we continue to add over 100GB of new data every week, using Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) has helped us save 70% in new RAID hardware."
With this, Magnasoft Northstar can provide updates to customers from 85% (on-premise hosting) to 100%. However, with AWS, the deployment, management, and monitoring of very large infrastructure is handled and maintained by just a fraction of the human resources required as compared to a traditional ‘box & wire' data center-based infrastructure. This is because a significant amount of automation is enabled by the likes of monitoring services offered by Amazon CloudWatch which aims to build auto-scaling triggers into the application layer itself.
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CLOUD DELIVERABLES
Since deploying the AWS cloud platform, they can now provide updates to customers from 85% (on-premise hosting) to 100%. Due to which they can claim and provide 99.9% uptime because of AWS which none of our competitors are able to provide. "We treat school buses and children's safety as a mission critical service, which has prompted us to ensure that (a) our SMS messages/alerts to parents, schools and police (in cases of accidents) are guaranteed to be delivered in 6 seconds, and (b) our mobile and web applications can load the data very quickly and provide timely information requested by parents, schools, etc, within a matter of seconds," added Kunal Ashar, Head, Product Development Division, Magnasoft Northstar.
Lastly, apart from flexibility, scalability and cost, another key benefit has been the fuelling of greater innovation within the company. AWS has helped them to improve their solutions and upgrade them.