Giunti Psychometrics Achieves Rapid Migration to AWS with Neboola

Working with Neboola allowed Giunti Psychometrics to achieve a rapid migration of its on-premises IT infrastructure to AWS in a 40-day window, with almost zero downtime. The company can now rely on AWS managed services and uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) to deliver a reliable and scalable architecture to support its global growth.

Founded in Italy in 1950, Giunti Psychometrics has grown significantly to become a worldwide provider of psychological assessment tools to measure personality, behaviors, and cognitive ability.

 

With subsidiaries in over 17 countries worldwide, the company is widely used to support the work of specialists in both the private and public sector and in a wide range of domains, including mental health, talent management, and school orientation. With a large number of web apps used to support its testing and assessments processes and with a growing business, the company found it was becoming limited by its on-premises IT environment. Buying more equipment would be too costly and would also mean expanding its IT team to manage it.

 

With global expansion a main priority, the company needed to urgently put more resources into ongoing business development. Since its data center contract was coming to an end, Giunti Psychometrics took the opportunity to migrate to a more flexible cloud-native infrastructure on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The company hoped the migration would reduce costs, and increase reliability and scalability. Ensuring minimal downtime during the migration was essential, as the company’s Windows-based workloads would not tolerate such disruption. “We looked at a number of cloud players at first and we found that building on AWS was a no-brainer,” says Tommaso Salsetta, ICT manager, Giunti Psychometrics, Italy. “It was clear that AWS was a cloud provider that could really help us fulfill both our short- and long-term goals.”

 

Giunti Psychometrics decided to use the services of AWS Select Services Partner Neboola to help it with a rapid lift-and-shift migration. It based its decision on Neboola’s experience in this area, in addition to its deep AWS expertise. The entire project had a short deadline of just 40 days and had to keep operational interruptions to a minimum.

Neboola set up a 4-stage process, beginning with an inventory of Giunti Psychometrics' entire IT environment. It wanted to understand its workloads, applications, and domains, to ensure the migration would stay properly on track. This was followed by a phase of scheduling and connectivity testing, in addition to server configuration checks to assess the efficacy of the migration, and final testing of the new cloud-based set up. “Neboola was the ideal partner for this project,” says Salsetta. “We had never done an inventory on this scale before, and it proved to be the essential first step to set us up for a smooth-running migration. Having clear signposts for what we needed to do and by when gave us absolute confidence that the entire process would run smoothly and be delivered on time.”

 

Neboola used AWS Application Migration Service to move the company’s web applications from its legacy Windows and Linux systems. This allowed for real-time replication of its system data to maintain service continuity.

 

Neboola also deployed the AWS Migration Acceleration Program for Windows (MAP), migrating the system to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for Windows to minimize downtime.

Downtime was a key issue for the company. “We simply can’t afford for our ecommerce web app to have any kind of outage and thanks to Neboola that didn't happen,” says Salsetta. “The only downtime we could put up with was for the online testing web app—that migration was planned into our weekly maintenance schedule, so we were only actually down for five minutes. Whatever problem presented itself, Neboola always provided a workaround.”

 

Neboola also migrated the company’s large number of databases, which were moved onto Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to handle file sharing and data archiving. Neboola also introduced AWS Application Load Balancer to help manage the company’s large number of domains, making it much faster to apply changes and carry out configurations.

 

The entire project was completed within the 40-day timeframe with the company’s employees able to continue working throughout with no perceptible loss of service. Giunti Psychometrics is now using a much broader network bandwidth, meaning it can grow more easily, increase its global reach, provide better support for its subsidiary companies in Russia and Chile, and greatly increase its number of concurrent users.

Using AWS managed services means Giunti Psychometrics has a more reliable system. “It doesn't have to be maintained or managed and it's all easily scalable, so we can increase or reduce our capacity when we need to too,” adds Salsetta. “Thanks to our new web-based interface we can quickly turn off our development servers at nights and on weekends, saving lots of time and money. It used to take us a couple of days to do that.”

 

During the project, Giunti Psychometrics moved its infrastructure management to Spain, to benefit from its in-house AWS expertise there, which included its newly hired chief information officer. To support the move Neboola developed a series of handover documents to assist in ongoing IT management.

 

With its flexible new cloud system, the company can now handle big influxes of work, such as for university admissions tests, when demand for its psychometric tests is high. “Since last year this part of our business has grown significantly. We often have to assess 6,000 students in a single week but thanks to Neboola and AWS, we can comfortably handle periods like this without any stress,” says Salsetta.

To continue its journey of digital transformation, Giunti Psychometrics plans to increase its use of AWS to further optimize costs. The company is developing new back-up procedures to manage GDPR data and privacy information. It is also planning to introduce autoscaling for its web applications to deliver more flexibility.

 

“Working with Neboola has delivered many benefits, not least its ability to deliver on a complex project so quickly,” Salsetta concludes. “Using its deep AWS knowledge, we now have a solid cloud infrastructure we can trust—one that gives us a strong set of foundations to grow with confidence.”