HIGH AVAILABILITY WEB HOSTING ENABLES DISASTER RESPONDERS TO PROTECT LIVES AND PROPERTY

Transcription

1 HIGH AVAILABILITY WEB HOSTING ENABLES DISASTER RESPONDERS TO PROTECT LIVES AND PROPERTY Taking Government to the Cloud Greensboro Drive, Ste McLean, VA AISN (2476)

2 STATE EMERGENCY SITE SERVING 9 MILLION RELIES ON AISN TO STAY DISASTER-READY. AISN SOLUTION SAVES 95% OVER 5 YEARS. Who Should Read This? CIOs, IT directors and business continuity planners tasked with maintaining a mission-critical website and/or planning a comprehensive data backup and disaster recovery strategy. The Core Issues Faced Implementing a cost-effective hosting solution for a missioncritical website Ensuring that the solution meets zero tolerance criteria for downtime Establishing geo-redundant site backup/ recovery Staying within a tight government budget 1

3 THE BUSINESS CHALLENGE AISN engaged with a state emergency management agency that serves nearly 9 million residents and 650,000 businesses annually by providing a coordinated response to floods, storms, earthquakes and other disasters occurring within the state. It also works closely with several hundred local and regional government authorities, state and federal agencies, and volunteer organizations to provide emergency resources and expertise to communities that are developing localized emergency preparedness plans and working to elevate public awareness about safety and security through outreach campaigns. The agency s public-facing website is content-rich and functions as its No. 1 communications tool. As such, it s a key information portal that citizens and communities use during disasters. Because the site has to be ready to scale within seconds from just a few visitors to hundreds of thousands of visitors, the agency ruled out hosting the site internally. At potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars, the high capital expense associated with building out and maintaining a two-server datacenter that could accommodate more than 20,000 page views per hour on the site, would be cost prohibitive. The agency needed an external hosting provider able to provide: Zero tolerance for site downtime Immediate scalability to accommodate massive traffic spikes during a crisis Geo-redundant backup and disaster recovery strategy IT security and compliance exceeding federal and state standards The agency wondered, could all of these needs be met on a tight government budget? Why AISN Was Selected The client reviewed the services of numerous hosting providers and selected AISN to host its website based on AISN s: 20+ years success hosting mission-critical sites and apps for enterprise clients Ability to work within government budgetary constraints Solid experience providing thorough business continuity via cloud-based backup and disaster recovery High Availability cloud hosting environment, featuring stringent security and instant scalability Geographically diverse Tier III/Tier IV datacenters 24/7/365 personalized customer service 2

4 THE SOLUTION A custom, virtual infrastructure engineered for High Availability, security and scalability Geo-redundant online backup and disaster recovery High compliance with government security and data protection standards By moving to AISN s fully customized hosting solution, which utilizes stateof-the-art virtualization technologies, the agency website now stays live and functioning no matter how many people are accessing it. The architecture scales easliy, potentially accommodating crisis-generated traffic spikes of between one and two million page views per hour. Lower the total cost of ownership by more than 50% over five years AISN PRODUCED A THOROUGH DISASTER RECOVERY ASSESSMENT FOR THE SITE. GOALS INCLUDED: Simplify administration, resulting in 67% less time spent maintaining servers & conducting audits/inventories Pass 100% of compliance audits through enhanced security measures Maintain high availability, 24/7/365 3

5 AISN...ensures the site s continuous availability AISN engineered the site s new hosted infrastructure with a virtual web front-end server and virtual database server in an environment specifically engineered for High Availability, stringent security and scalability. The hosted infrastructure supports a content management system, a mobile site, a Spanish language translation, streaming video, photos, social media feeds, and location-based information (e.g., the nearest local emergency manager). The backup and disaster recovery strategy, which required geo-redundancy, was perhaps the most challenging aspect of the project. The agency was strapped for budget but still wanted to replicate its site s High Availability infrastructure in two separate datacenters a move that seemed cost prohibitive until AISN helped. To the agency s amazement, AISN executed a low-cost, geo-redundant solution that met all of its key criteria and virtually eliminated downtime. The site s production environment, which is located in an in-state datacenter, is replicated in real time to the recovery site, which is in a Tier IV datacenter located states away. In the event of a service interruption or emergency, the system automatically changes the DNS to the failover environment, allowing the standby environment to become the production environment within a split second. The website can continue to provide state citizens and communities with the information they need to endure the emergency. On an ongoing basis, AISN provides the agency with compliance guidance and security assessment and remediation services, including failover testing to ensure the site s continuous availability. 4

6 Key Results The state s key emergency portal is now reliably up and available, 24/7/365 better enabling emergency responders to protect the lives and property of citizens and businesses during emergencies and disasters. Other key results include: Millions of citizens and businesses, as well as hundreds of local and regional authorities, can depend upon the site 24/7/365 to get emergency response information when they need it most, thus helping to fulfill the agency s mission of providing 24-hour crisis coordination, information dissemination and warning services. The site is ready and capable of meeting the actual demands of disasters and emergencies. Performance tests show that the site scales linearly (with optimal efficiency) up to 1 million page views per hour at 20 instances, the largest test that the agency chose to run. The state dodged a high capital expense. In contrast to the hundreds of thousands of dollars it might have spent to build an on-premises solution, the agency pays AISN a hosting fee, which scales based on usage. That comes to about $21,000 per year for non-emergency use, compared to $80,000 per year to maintain an on-premises solution, a savings of about 74 percent. Emergency use would bring the fee up by only about $7,000 for the month in which the emergency occurred. Not only did the agency get a custom, state-of-the-art hosted solution, but its total cost of ownership dropped significantly. Hosting on-premises, the total cost of ownership would have come to $220,000 per year. With AISN, the total cost of ownership is $105,000 over 5 years for a reduction of more than 95 percent over 5 years. The agency used the cost savings achieved to address other portal needs such as updating the site s aging content management system and implementing additional security measures. The site is now entirely disaster resilient. Should the production site experience a service interruption or more crippling disaster at the primary datacenter, it fails over seamlessly to the disaster recovery environment. 5

7 FOR A FREE MIGRATION ASSESSMENT, OUR SALES TEAM AT SALES@AISN.NET Taking Government to the Cloud Greensboro Drive, Ste McLean, VA AISN (2476)