STP Migrates Legal Tech Solution and Modernizes Infrastructure with Storm Reply on AWS

STP is an independent software vendor (ISV) and provider of data services to legal companies and insolvency practitioners in Belgium, Bulgaria, Germany, and Switzerland. It is a highly regulated business and requires excellent reliability and availability from its supporting IT infrastructure. But its previously hosted service was causing data issues, leading to outages on a weekly basis that took a staff member most of a working day to remediate. The company could not tolerate these outages and made the decision to migrate to AWS because of its Regions and Availability Zones network of data centers where STP customers operate.

To support the migration, STP decided to work with a cloud solutions provider and enlisted AWS Partner Storm Reply after reviewing several providers. The company chose Storm Reply for its expertise with containers and strong experience supporting ISVs and software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies.

Since moving to AWS, STP has experienced no reliability issues. This has helped relieve the development team’s capacity and allows staff to focus on higher-value work. Better availability also enables teams to focus more on developing and improving services. “We’ve released 30–40 percent of operational capacity in cloud operations,” says Dirk Eisenberg, chief technology officer at STP. “That’s time that can be spent on higher-value tasks and improving the service for our customers.”

Although data sovereignty is an interest for STP, it was also confident that AWS had the right processes and procedures for the highly regulated legal market. “There is a strong demand for having local data centers, and AWS is outstanding in that regard where we operate,” says Eisenberg. “Although data sovereignty is an issue—especially in Switzerland—so are connectivity and concerns about latency. AWS is also the most developer-friendly cloud provider.”

STP is a medium-sized company formed from a series of mergers and acquisitions. It has 500 employees in total from the merger of five companies. A key benefit of working with AWS and Storm Reply was the ability to bring independent teams together onto one strategic cloud provider and to easily onboard new businesses and developer teams after acquisitions.

Because STP has a strong focus on containerized workloads, it wanted to move to AWS, using managed services wherever possible and serverless technologies like AWS Lambda, which lets STP run code without thinking about servers or clusters. Serverless services also help control costs during quiet periods, because STP needs to pay for those services only when they are in use.

The reliability of AWS was also important and not just for the benefit it brings to customers. There has also been a positive impact on the teams. STP uses Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), which automatically manages the availability and scalability of the Kubernetes control plane nodes responsible for scheduling containers, managing application availability, storing cluster data, and other key tasks. “We don’t go home and worry about getting an SMS alert,” says Eisenberg. “And if something does go wrong, we know we won’t have to wait till Monday morning to fix it.”

The first phase of the project—moving all workloads from local data centers to the cloud—was completed in less than a year. The company’s data center has now been closed, and STP is still optimizing systems and allocating workloads more logically and efficiently. “Storm Reply helps us both strategically and tactically in this regard,” says Eisenberg. “We’re also working on cloud governance and ensuring that people can only access what they need. Getting this right will also help with future acquisitions.”

STP provides software and workflow solutions and also data services. Its data systems crawl publicly available data sets such as insolvency court reports and company filings. Data must be found, cleaned, and ingested. Systems must then analyze the data and send it on to the right customers—for instance, health providers must track personal insolvency announcements.

Previous systems struggled with the varied demands. German notaries, for example, are very busy at the end of the year and during the first week of January. There are also daily peaks that correlate with office hours when civil servants update datasets. Now scaling is all done automatically by AWS Lambda. Crawlers are throttled to avoid overwhelming public systems. Data crawling now costs €200–€300 per month, which is 10 times more cost effective than it was before. Previously, STP required several virtual machines, IP addresses, and management time to check just one ledger.

Moving to AWS has helped STP improve DevOps by providing a structured and automated way to bring workloads into the cloud. It has been a step change for developers, but they are beginning to understand the power that is available to them.

The company is looking at providing more sophisticated and real-time data products using Amazon API Gateway, a fully managed service that makes it easy for developers to create, publish, maintain, monitor, and secure APIs at any scale.

Although development and innovation are important, it is system reliability that matters most to STP. “Our customers trust our products and we have worked hard to earn that,” says Eisenberg. “We’re lucky to have that same trust in both Storm Reply and AWS, who have given us confidence in their abilities every step of the way.”