Grupo SM Upskills with AWS Training Partner Itera to Drive Efficiency and Save Costs

As part of its migration to the cloud, the Spanish-language publishing company Grupo SM wanted to provide comprehensive training for its employees so that they could better understand how to optimize solutions using AWS. With sales in nearly 80 countries, SM specializes in the publication of educational material, fiction for children and adolescents, and religious literature. SM worked with AWS Training Partner Itera to design a comprehensive training plan with AWS Training and Certification courses. The plan helped increase the knowledge of the staff, translating to higher productivity for employees, more resilient solutions, better service for customers, and cost savings for the company.

The Spanish-language publishing company Grupo SM (SM) has been moving an increasing number of its educational applications and services to the cloud, and it needed a way to help employees better understand how to optimize the company’s use of Amazon Web Services (AWS). Its staff had widely varying degrees of knowledge about cloud-based services, and SM wanted to develop training that benefited engineers, customer service personnel, and other employees no matter their levels of expertise. SM worked with AWS Training Partner Itera to design a comprehensive training plan through AWS Training and Certification courses, which help companies build and validate skills so that they can get more out of the cloud. The plan helped increase the knowledge of the staff, translating to higher productivity for employees, more resilient solutions, and better service for customers, as well as cost savings for the company.

Based in Madrid and with sales in nearly 80 countries, SM specializes in the publication of Spanish-language educational materials, fiction for children and adolescents, and religious literature. Together with its SM Foundation, the company seeks to use digital solutions in its mission to transform and improve the world through education and culture, with special emphasis on vulnerable populations. In 2016, the company wanted to expand the reach of SM Aprendizaje, its digital education service, and began using AWS solutions in the move from on-premises hardware to the cloud. As part of the migration, the publisher wanted to provide adequate training for its employees so that they could better understand operations in the cloud and, specifically, how to use the tools that AWS offered. “We wanted not a training that was generic but one that was specific to our needs, concerns, and infrastructure,” says Mario Rodríguez, Infrastructure Manager at Grupo SM. “We wanted the basic knowledge, yes, but also to be able to apply data to practical cases or problems that our staff had.”

SM wanted an IT partner that specialized in training so that it could receive targeted guidance in designing a plan that optimized the use of AWS solutions, increased staff productivity, and improved customer service. It chose Itera—which specializes in helping educational organizations throughout Latin America and Spain to optimize their uses of AWS—to help design its AWS Training programs. The breadth of offerings from AWS Training and Certification served employees at all levels of knowledge, from courses for those with no knowledge of AWS architecture to courses for experts. By 2020, as the company began to depend more heavily on the cloud for its various applications and services, SM began to incorporate more courses offered by AWS Training and Certification. Together, SM and Itera identified employees’ skills gaps and created learning paths that matched different teams and professionals with the AWS skill sets that they required. In addition to using instructor-led training, both in person and online, SM used labs to apply AWS knowledge to real-life scenarios.

The first round of training involved 73 employees, who took courses such as Architecting on AWS—which teaches how to design good cloud architecture—and Developing on AWS, which shows how to develop secure and scalable cloud applications. SM wanted to help its infrastructure team to be fully equipped to address the requirements of the company’s increasing digital transformation and understand all the solutions available on AWS. After the initial round of courses focused on architecture and development on AWS, SM added specialized courses. These included DevOps Engineering on AWS—which teaches how to use DevOps philosophies, practices, and tools to develop, deliver, and maintain applications and services at high velocity on AWS—and Security Engineering on AWS, which teaches how to efficiently use AWS security services. “At SM, we strive to have the best engineers and to offer them the greatest possible knowledge,” Rodríguez says. “If I want to retain them, I offer them relevant wages as well as training that satisfies them.”

The increase in knowledge that engineers receive through AWS Training and Certification helps them to better estimate the time it takes to develop new products and accelerates the process of product development. Plus, employees’ improved understanding of how to optimize AWS services has helped the company reduce costs. For example, SM engineers learned how to use Amazon Aurora, which is designed for high performance and availability at a global scale with full MySQL and PostgreSQL compatibility. “Our use of Aurora for certain applications—with intensive use at certain times of the year—means that we can now scale automatically without having to have an oversized infrastructure to cover these times,” says Rodríguez. In addition to the technical benefits of the serverless capabilities of Aurora, SM saw a 30 percent reduction in yearly database costs. Engineers also learned about types of storage solutions on AWS, and they were able to use this information to set up documentation storage in different tiers based on actual use. This proper use of AWS storage tiers has reduced SM’s storage expenses by about 50 percent.

AWS Training and Certification has also improved the resilience of SM’s solutions as it migrates to the cloud. The team understands better how to use AWS Managed Services (AMS) to operate its AWS infrastructure more efficiently and securely, which has resulted in faster processes and fewer outages while avoiding major security breaches. Plus, the company is better able to manage how it shares information and infrastructure with its business partners. “Both our internal and external clients benefit from our better understanding of how to use AWS solutions,” Rodríguez says. “Our external clients perceive our robustness in that our services do not freeze. Our internal customers see much more, such as security, backups, and cost containment.”

SM plans to continue to train all its personnel through AWS Training and Certification so that employees continue to evolve as the business grows and as its corresponding use of technology expands. As the company continues to phase out its on-premises data centers and migrate all its offerings to the cloud, it seeks to use AWS Training and Certification solutions to help develop more highly specialized technicians and other personnel, especially those involved in customer service. “Working with AWS Training and Certification helps our employees grow as professionals,” says Rodríguez. “That will make them feel better and better doing their jobs.”