Logistics company adopts AWS Cloud for their Document

Management Infrastructure with Aufsite

Client: Logistics Company

Location: Gloucester City, NJ

Industry: Supply Chain Solutions

The Challenge

A Logistics Company through its independently managed affiliate companies, offers end-to-end port, warehouse, and logistics solutions for importers and exporters. Their warehousing and distribution services provide 1.3 million square feet of dry storage and they are the leaders in handling perishable cargos such as fruit, meat, frozen concentrate, and dairy products.

Considering the size of their operations and multiple locations in Pennsylvania and New Jersey and the projected exponential growth, they needed to quickly deploy a robust and scalable solution to handle their document management solution. This company has trusted our strategic partner as their “go-to” technical support resource for managing their Square9 Document Management Solution for years. Square9’s Global Suite is an intricate part of their business. It allows them to capture, extract, classify and validate data that provides critical insight in to customer operations and allows them to convert it in to actionable items. When this partner was tasked to find the right solution, having an astute awareness of cutting edge technologies and a clear understanding of Holts requirements, they knew the answer right away…it was The Cloud.

They also knew their trusted partner, Aufsite, would be able to answer the tough question -how do they migrate the critical server and database components in to the Cloud, set up secure access to their agent-based clients in remote offices in New Jersey and Pennsylvania with minimal downtime and impact to a 24/7 operation?

The Solution

The Aufsite Team worked with our partner to first identify the issue. Knowing the cloud can offer a solution, with years of experience, we’ve learned that it’s not always the best solution. After evaluating all the options, we recognized that shifting to the cloud with meet all the necessary requirements and provide the leverage in efficiency and cost as a value add for the client.

The Aufsite Team architected a solution, drew up the project plans and got the approval from the client to move forward.

The solution was all encompassing. The idea was not to lift and shift the existing servers and databases but rather find cloud-native solutions that would enable the customer’s applications thrive in the cloud….storage components should be able to grow and shrink as needed, databases should be used as a service and network connectivity should be seamless but encrypted over VPN.

Aufsite deployed a VPC with private subnets to secure the client Cloud network. Public and Private subnets gained external access via NAT gateways and Internet gateways respectively. The customer was provided with granular detail of configuration for their firewalls so that a redundant VPN tunnel could be established for all of their locations. Once deployed, the VPN was rigorously tested and connectivity was confirmed through a series of tests. Security Groups were established to limit access to only the required ports and services. Using external-facing application load balancers, the customer was able to relinquish their need to manage SSL certificates because now SSL was terminating at the Managed Application Load Balancer rather than at the server level.

Customer data was migrated to the new environment seamlessly and cutover was phased by location with a straightforward contingency plan for reversion if needed. A reversion was not needed and the client was successfully migrated to the AWS Cloud in a matter of weeks.