Keatons Gains Flexibility, Reduces Cloud Costs Using AWS Well-Architected Review Led by 3Gi

Keatons, a London-based real estate company, saw business application performance improve dramatically when it migrated from an on-premises data center to AWS a few years ago. But because the migration was a straight lift and shift—with no software optimized for the cloud—performance still suffered when users ran multiple applications at once. AWS Partner 3Gi Technology, which supported Keatons’ initial AWS migration, suggested performing an AWS Well-Architected review to improve server architecture. 3Gi then redesigned Keatons’ AWS architecture with 16 servers instead of six, each configured for a smaller number of users. Today, Keatons has a cost-efficient AWS architecture that has eliminated its previous performance issues, increased its uptime to 99.95 percent, and reduced costs by 20 percent.

Keatons is a real estate company with multiple offices across London. Over the past 25 years, it has grown to a team of around 100 people. It migrated from an on-premises data center to Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2019 with the help of 3Gi Technology, an AWS Partner that specializes in digital transformation. Keatons saw significant improvements in workload performance after its cloud migration, although some of its business applications—which hadn’t been optimized for the cloud—continued to load and run slowly during peak usage times.

3Gi, which has been Keatons’ outsourced IT team since the AWS migration, suggested an AWS Well-Architected review—used to learn, measure, and build using architectural best practices—to identify opportunities for improvement. The goal was to find areas where the cloud architecture could be improved to optimize the performance of its business software, in particular Citrix for flexible working from any location and Reapit for real estate agency management. Within a couple of months, 3Gi designed, tested, and completed a re-architecture of Keatons’ cloud environment that eliminated issues with slow software performance.

Today, Keatons has a cloud architecture that scales automatically according to user demand. This has helped the company to reduce its cloud costs by 20 percent. It is also working with 3Gi to refine its AWS environment further to improve performance even more for its heaviest software users.

When Keatons first migrated to AWS, it chose to do a straight lift and shift of applications from its data center to the cloud. That helped the company to complete the migration quickly without having to spend extra time refactoring its software for cloud-native performance. And the benefits were considerable, reducing the frequency of software performance problems from 40 percent to 10 percent. Over time, however, 3Gi—which acts as Keatons’ outsourced chief information officer and IT team—was still managing ongoing requests for support from employees who experienced lagging and other troubles when they needed to use multiple business applications at the same time.

Users would sometimes even avoid using certain devices, such as iPhones, to share images because they knew they would have trouble opening documents. “We’d have this rush of people who were jumping online and using those resources,” says Rupert Verdi, co-founder of Keatons. “Certain things were proving to be really clunky, and there was an issue with load balancing.”

So 3Gi suggested performing an AWS Well-Architected review, putting a focus on how to redesign Keatons’ Citrix environment in AWS to improve operational efficiency and cost effectiveness. Keatons agreed. Over the next month, 3Gi closely monitored Keatons’ server utilization, CPU consumption, and more, and then created a rearchitecting plan to reduce performance issues. The project involved using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which provides secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload, to distribute Keatons’ workloads across 16 servers rather than six, and deploying an automated load balancer and autoscaling to adjust capacity according to user demand.

3Gi also used findings from the AWS Well-Architected review to optimize security, backup, and recovery services for Keatons. “I recommend them highly, from the top down,” Verdi says of 3Gi. “They’ve been excellent.”

Before rolling out the new architecture to all of Keatons’ users, 3Gi focused its testing on the company’s finance team, which has the most complex IT needs and frequently runs multiple applications that are integrated with Barclays financial software. After users in that department were satisfied with the performance of the new architecture, other employees across Keatons were added to the new system in groups. The complete changeover went seamlessly during a low-traffic period overnight, and application performance across the organization immediately improved. Keatons’ software uptime is now 99.95 percent.