About Mondaq
Mondaq is an intelligent syndication platform providing world-class content and insights from professional services firms.
Bringing a different model to the market, Mondaq believes that senior decision-makers “seek” knowledge and insight when they need it, from reliable and highly regarded online resources, as well as information being delivered to their inbox.
Recent developments in A.I. (and the addition of an in-house Data Science team) have enabled Mondaq to further improve content delivery to the right audience, at the right time, supported by strong partnerships with leading online resources (including subscription-only services such as Dow Jones, Bloomberg, WestLaw).
Mondaq were hosting their customer facing websites and services on AWS following a quick self-migration from a previous datacenter. This was performed as a direct lift and shift, consisting mainly of EC2 instances. After completing this migration, Mondaq were connected to Devoteam by AWS to receive additional guidance in modernising and future-proofing the platform in order to increase security, operational resilience, data flexibility, and cost optimisation.
The Challenge
Following an initial Well-Architected Framework Review of Mondaq’s Current State AWS environment and associated code, with consideration given to future customer requirements, Devoteam mapped out an infrastructure to provide the same services at minimum cost, with sufficient resilience and ease of maintenance.
The Solution
The planning phase commenced as part of a Modernisation Viability Assessment. This produced a set of designs steps, comprising the project delivery as follows:
Migration plan
Taking all dependencies and requirements gathered within the assessment phase, Devoteam created a step-by-step migration plan document that identified all the actions to be carried out in sequential order, and which individual(s) were responsible for each of those actions. This document helped all parties align on their responsibilities, provided visibility and helped the migration to proceed seamlessly with minimal disruption to the end-users.
Automation
Creating a multi-account structure using AWS Organizations, utilising services like Security, Hub, GuardDuty, and SSO to help automate security posture.
Security
Migrating all application servers from a public to private VPCs to increase security, and performing right sizing analysis for cost optimisation. The latter was also applied in the adoption of the Cloud-native service AWS RDS running Microsoft SQL (when migrating away from EC2 instances hosting the data layer).
The Benefits
Mondaq’s engagement with Devoteam resulted in their AWS environment becoming Well-Architected, aligning with best practice and leveraging Cloud-native automation.
Where Mondaq previously relied heavily on Provisioned IOPS storage on EC2, adoption of Cloud-native services eliminated this need. RDS ensures that all databases are managed, backed-up and scalable; CloudWatch dashboards provide vital operational information and AWS Back-Up always ensures protection of data assets.
The engagement also helped Mondaq achieve a greater understanding of AWS and recognise its potential to make their environment even more scalable and Cloud-native when looking ahead to future AI and big data projects.
“Working with Devoteam has been an excellent experience. We have found them to be highly professional, diligent, detailed and concise. They got to understand our set up very well and really grasped how our business and its systems and processes functioned.”
Andrew PartridgeCEO at Mondaq