Community Brands provides cloud-based software to non-profits, associations, and K-12 schools to lessen the technology divide between purpose-driven and for-profit organizations. These institutions tap Community Brands’ best-of-breed software solutions and technical expertise to manage membership, donations, fundraising, admissions, enrollment, events, and more. The organization serves more than 100,000 clients in 30 countries, and employs 2,000 people.
Community Brands operated its software on a multi-cloud environment, but the company wanted to improve robustness, agility, and automation. With a data center contract ending in a few months, the IT team decided to migrate a specific customer-facing application to a public cloud platform. That would free up IT resources for product innovation and strengthen Community Brands’ SaaS offerings, but the IT team also needed to maintain security, compliance, and performance across its global customer base.
The team chose to migrate its “Careers” application to AWS. Careers is used by more than 3,000 associations to support job boards, provide career resources, and deliver online and onsite career fairs. Hosted onsite, the Careers application utilized 100 servers and 2 TB of data. The switch to AWS needed to be swift, seamless, and secure.
Migration Safeguards Security and Enables Automation
Community Brands needed an experienced partner and reliable tools to help them with the migration. After thorough vetting, the company turned to Hitachi Vantara, with whom it had collaborated successfully on a previous project. Community Brands laid out its goals: migrate the Careers platform to AWS in three months with minimal disruption to users and ensure data and network security.
The Hitachi Vantara team reviewed Community Brands’ current and future security concerns, risks, and compliance requirements. It created a solution that would meet the company’s many security needs, reduce vulnerabilities, and provide more agility.
As part of the project, updates to the infrastructure behind the Careers platform enabled automated scaling up or down based on business needs. Automation was extended to the continuous integration and deployment pipeline, so new code can be executed without network or user downtime.
Hitachi Vantara also addressed the container architecture, so it can support the changing user demand on the Careers platform and Community Brands’ innovation plans. The architecture is more efficient, supports rapid development, and enables batched releases, so the company can add new features quickly as customer demand warrants.
Network Efficiencies Enable Cutting-edge Product Development
The partnership with Hitachi Vantara resulted in the successful migration of Careers to AWS with enhanced protection against security threats and limited customer disruption. The new platform allows the Careers application to automatically scale up or down by as much as 25 percent, adjusting for user demand and ensuring consistent high-quality performance.
The new application platform also has reduced cloud operating costs. It enables regular updates without scheduled bi-weekly downtime, so new features can be released at any time, without consumer disruption. In addition, the IT team doesn’t have to work late nights to update the system, allowing the staff to focus on application innovation.
Find out about Hitachi Vantara’s Cloud Migration solutions.
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