AWS Case Study: UST Global

Internally, UST Global utilizes a variety of offerings from the Amazon Web Services (AWS) feature stack, such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) with Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). These services support the company’s Magento-based ecommerce implementation and a Moodle-based course management solution. In the future, the company plans to leverage AWS as its global innovation platform.

Biju Chandrasekharan, UST Global’s Cloud Computing Practice Lead, says his development team is able to overcome challenges more easily with AWS due to “the luxury of setting up and tearing down environments within minutes and for a fraction of the cost, which helps us tremendously when troubleshooting issues.”

Additionally, the company employs AWS when crafting cloud-based solutions for its clients. One such client is Eurasia Group, a political risk research and consulting company. Eurasia Group asked UST Global to design, develop, and deploy an interactive web application to serve as a centralized knowledge base for business intelligence information.

In response to this challenge, UST Global turned to AWS to create an efficient and economical application infrastructure. Tony Velleca, CIO for UST Global explains, “The ability to get ‘on demand’ compute and storage power in minutes made it possible to build and deploy this solution in nine weeks—end-to-end. UST Global’s development teams built five environments for this project including Development, Testing, Staging, Production, and Disaster Recovery. The company also reduced the cost of overall development by more than fifty percent.”

Today, Eurasia Group’s business intelligence application provides its clients’ users with strategic geo-political intelligence covering more than twenty countries, six global regions, and two vertical business sectors.

According to Tony, UST Global will continue to employ AWS when developing its own applications and those of its clients because of the “speed at which an AWS environment (or environments) can be provisioned and made available to the development teams in comparison to self-provisioning a physical server.” Tony also notes that “An AWS solution can be tailored to meet our specific technical needs, and we don’t have additional costs for unwanted or unused capabilities. The ROI for an AWS solution is positive when compared with self-provisioning and accounting for the ongoing support and management.”

To learn more, visit http://www.ust-global.com/ .

Added January 24, 2012