Bytes Helps Ramtech Migrate WiSE Security Platform to Improve Reliability Using AWS

Founded in 1990 in Nottingham, UK, Ramtech is a specialist in wireless communications, providing fire detection and security systems for the construction and industrial sectors respectively. It has customers in over 30 countries and employs over 70 people across the UK, Europe, and North America. One of the company’s products is an application called WiSE—a physical security alarm system that protects tens of thousands of holiday park homes throughout the UK. When an alarm sensor is triggered, the system alerts park security, who can respond quickly, providing an invaluable service to the holiday home owners.

The WiSE platform and its associated databases were running on a third-party data center, which was causing management and maintenance problems. Its hardware was nearing end of life, scaling was slow and required capital expenditure to update, and its technical teams spent too much time troubleshooting. “We needed a near-zero-downtime platform so we could sell it to our customers guaranteeing a high SLA,” says Dale Howard, IT manager at Ramtech. “We were wasting too many resources sending engineers to our data center every time a hard drive was full or a database needed updating.”

Ramtech started developing a plan to transform the infrastructure hosting WiSE. The end goal was to re-platform WiSE so it would be more reliable, scale easily, and free up the Ramtech IT team from the burden of maintaining hardware. Another important objective was to improve its backup and disaster recovery plans. After a thorough investigation, the company decided to migrate the WiSE platform to AWS and recruited the help of AWS Partner Bytes.

The teams from Bytes and Ramtech completed the discovery phase in April 2023 and finalized the technical details to complete the WiSE platform migration. “It was time consuming because we had lots of internal software to upgrade and prepare,” says Howard. “We wanted to ensure there would be no downtime when we made the switch, and it really helped that Bytes are AWS experts.”

The migration was completed in 5 months. All the databases attached to WiSE were transferred using Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL, which allows you to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud with just a few clicks. For general storage needs, it uses Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)—object storage built to retrieve any amount of data from anywhere.

The WiSE platform is more reliable and simple to scale since the migration to AWS. Greater reliability has also improved the productivity of Ramtech’s field service engineers, who previously would not be able to work when the system was unavailable. “If WiSE is down, our service team of ten engineers can’t make repairs or onboard new customers,” says Howard. “Since migrating to AWS, we’ve had zero downtime, so our customers remain protected, the service team can do its job, and we don’t lose revenue.”