Case Study: CSS Corporation

In developing their original platform, Support Minds, CSS was successful in creating consumer support services directly for end customers who were initially receiving support from the Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) or product owners]. Working off this success, CSS partnered with 4D Global Partners, LLC to offer CSS’s tech support, parental control, defragmentation, disk clean up, and support map services under Tech Support For Dummies (TSFD), to be delivered as a customer-installation application framework through remote support, chat support, Web ticketing and voice support. Tech Support For Dummies aims to be a one-stop tech support answer for security and connectivity issues, enabling customers to create a Web case, schedule a call with tech support executives, directly call a tech support assistance helpline, receive tech support through real-time chat, and receive tech support through remote desktop support.

CSS uses a variety of Amazon Web Services (AWS) to implement these tools, including all of the following:

• Amazon Simple Storage Solution (Amazon S3)
  
• Amazon Elastic Block Storage (Amazon EBS)
  
• Amazon CloudWatch
  
• Amazon Auto Scaling
  
• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)
  
• Amazon Elastic Load Balancing
  

The following diagram demonstrates how AWS is incorporated in the CSS architecture:

CSS analyzed a variety of options before selecting AWS as a solution provider. Because CSS is growing rapidly and has variability in demand, forecasting business growth is challenging. They needed to implement a solution in a cost effective way. “We identified AWS as a partner flexible enough to meet our needs while providing the added benefit of transferring our infrastructure to cloud,” says CSS Evangelist Arun Velayudham. “AWS provides us flexibility in cost and service management, thus helping us extend our service offerings to our customers,” adds Velayudham.

CSS saved substantial time-to-market with AWS, eliminating the time investment of raising a request for a server, purchasing it from a vendor, and setting it up in the CSS environment. “If we compare ourselves with another project of the same size, we are able to save 30 to 40% time in delivering our services,” says Velayudham.

CSS cites numerous success stories as a result of using AWS:

• Successful implementation of agile development methodology in delivering services to customers
  
• Segmentation of resources mapping the services offered by AWS
  
• Successful implementation of Java Open Single Sign-On (JOSSO)
  
• Reverse proxy and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) using Apache on both Windows and Linux platforms
  
• SQL server replication in the cloud is backed up in Amazon S3 for disaster recovery
  

“The migration of applications from our datacenter to AWS is a painless process that meets the availability and scalability requirements of our customers,” says Velayudham.

To learn more, visit http://www.csscorp.com/ .