Vivaticket provides ticketing and access control services for over 3,500 clients located worldwide. Formerly a series of localized businesses in various countries, these brands were brought under the common umbrella of Vivaticket in 2018. “Since we rebranded the company, we have been pursuing a strategy of growth and expansion all over the world, always offering our best product with a strong drive for innovation,” says Lazzari. “To avoid localization and be in the right place with all the clients that we have globally, using the cloud was the best choice.”

Vivaticket previously hosted its services in a hybrid model across eight data centers and another cloud provider. However, the distribution of resources across these data centers was expensive and didn’t always meet the company’s standards for infrastructure creation, security management, and software deployment. Upgrading each location to keep pace with the company’s growth would have required a huge investment. Instead, Vivaticket began investigating the possibility of migrating its B2B services to the cloud and chose AWS as a cloud provider. “The methodology of AWS makes it an ideal provider for evolving the company mindset, not just the technology itself,” says Maurizio Trezzi, global head of IT at Vivaticket. “It is a cloud provider that is investing continuously in the technology, and we also gained a lot of trust working with the AWS account team.”

In 2023, Vivaticket began a lift-and-shift migration of its B2B solutions to AWS. To strategically plan the migration, it took part in the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (AWS MAP), a comprehensive and proven cloud migration program, which provided a framework for the project. At the assessment phase of the AWS MAP methodology, Vivaticket also went through the AWS Optimization and Licensing Assessment (AWS OLA), a program to optimize license and compute costs before and after migration. At this stage, Vivaticket could project that it would save 26 percent on the total cost of ownership for its solutions by migrating to AWS.

To implement the migration, Vivaticket worked with Engineering Ingegneria Informatica S.p.A., an AWS Partner, and with AWS Professional Services, a global team of experts that can help organizations realize desired business outcomes when using AWS. During the mobilization phase of the AWS MAP methodology, Vivaticket and AWS Professional Services did a deep dive into the infrastructure of Vivaticket’s solutions to prepare for the migration and to take a look at AWS-managed alternatives in the cloud, such as Amazon Aurora, which provides unparalleled high performance and availability at global scale with full MySQL and PostgreSQL compatibility.

By migrating to AWS, Vivaticket gains agility. It can upgrade its systems faster and automate deployments. The company’s solutions will also have greater availability and higher fault tolerance on AWS. Vivaticket takes advantage of automatic scaling features within the AWS solutions that it uses, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which provides secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload. By enabling automatic scaling, Vivaticket can respond quickly to changes in demand, such as when tickets for an event go on sale using Vivaticket’s solution. “For many live concerts, we find out that the sales will open only a few days before,” says Lazzari. “It’s very important to be agile, and on AWS, we can manage these peaks easily.”

As part of the migration, Vivaticket standardized its infrastructure management across teams and locations. “We are creating a common model of automation in how we create and manage resources using logs, monitoring, and alerting,” says Trezzi. “This standardization will make it possible for us to manage the particularities of our industry, which has high peaks of activity at certain times and low usage at other times.” By having better resource management on AWS, Vivaticket expects to drastically reduce the costs of its infrastructure because it will pay for only what it needs.

These changes to the management models within the organization are the most complex part of the project for Vivaticket. “The migration is a cultural change,” says Lazzari. “We have received proactive support from AWS Professional Services that involved our entire team and pushed us to find new ways to manage our workloads. We are studying new sales models for our services and setting process management standards.”

Vivaticket expects to finish migrating its B2B solutions by the end of 2024, in 18 months total. The migration will reduce costs and give Vivaticket greater scalability as the company grows. Although most of the migration has been lift and shift, the company is also exploring new services available on AWS and will continue to innovate with cloud technology in the coming years.

“Working with the AWS team has been intellectually stimulating, productive, and valuable for the entire Vivaticket team,” says Lazzari.