AWS Case Study: ftopia

Accommodating the needs of customers on both sides of the Atlantic has its challenges. ftopia, a supplier of secure online file-sharing workspaces for businesses, understands those challenges as they serve a growing European and American customer base.

“Our goal is to let professional users share information easily, securely and instantly with their team, customers and partners, wherever there are, whatever network endpoint they use,” says Philippe Honigman, President, ftopia. “In order to meet our customer’s needs we need to consider the location of our servers to increase connection speed and manage regulatory compliance.”

To deliver their Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering, ftopia decided to use Amazon Web Services (AWS) and leverage its data centers in the EU and US. Honigman explains, “AWS offered a high level of security and availability in the US and Europe compared to a traditional hosting service, high-throughput file transfer capability (Amazon S3), scalability (the ability to scale up as large customers come online), and affordable costs.”

“When we first started to use Amazon Web Services, we were stunned to discover how easy and fast it was to launch new virtual machines instances. By removing the cost and the burden of managing a high-throughput computing infrastructure, Amazon has become the key enabler of our business,” recalls Honigman. “The first version of our service was rolled out in less than 6 months. Using our own infrastructure would have required a higher initial funding that in turn would have taken approximately 6 to 9 months to complete.”

Setting up a reliable, secure, and scalable infrastructure for a professional file sharing app represents a very significant initial investment and operating costs – even when outsourcing the infrastructure to a traditional hosting provider. Honigman continues, “Choosing AWS has spared us hundreds of thousands of Euros in hardware, facilities, security systems, sysadmin resources, etc., thus enabling us to focus on the development of our core value, i.e. our PaaS and SaaS offering.”

Along with serving customers across multiple geographies, ftopia serves customers across different markets with different priorities. Customers in finance and legal demand a high level of security and confidentiality while others are more concerned about performance. For example, M&C Saatchi, a global advertising and media company, uses ftopia to share video rushes with customers and remote team members. “ftopia is very useful to us. Sharing large files with distant coworkers is not a problem anymore, all the information exchanges are simplified and we gain in effectiveness,” declares the Executive Producer of OverEasy, M&C Saatchi GAD.

“With AWS, we are able to offer our customers, like M&C Saatchi, enterprise-grade infrastructure security and exceptional performance,” Honigman explains. “In addition, Amazon not only levels the field when competing with older providers that have invested in their own infrastructure, but also offers a competitive advantage over incumbent vendors!”

ftopia is hosted on Amazon EC2 and stores customer documents on Amazon S3. The following architecture diagram shows how they use AWS infrastructure services: