AWS: Presbyterian Support Central's Stepping Stone to Innovation

Equipped with increased flexibility, cost savings and reliability, Fronde’s cloud solution has enabled one of New Zealand’s longest standing and most respected charities, Presbyterian Support Central (PSC), the freedom and flexibility to innovate for the future.

Fronde’s Amazon Web Services (AWS) public cloud solution included the development of a new environment with migration of existing services and upgrades, disaster recovery(DR), and continuous Managed Services support, all at a lower cost than their previous solution.

Considered once as a ‘bold move’, the shift to the cloud will now merely act as a stepping stone for Presbyterian Support Central (PSC), as they consider building future cloud strategies to harness further innovation in their business.

“Fronde opened up our thinking of cloud as a service and the possibility of doing a complete cloud solution.”

- Alan Lyford, IT Manager, PSC.

Liberated by Freedom & Flexibility

AWS pricing enables a pay only for precisely what is used model, meaning large loads can now be easily scaled yearly, monthly or even hourly, enabling the flexibility for companies to free up crucial funds.

The cost savings of moving to the new cloud solution, ($120,000 over a three year period), has meant new ideas can be trialled at PSC at a much lower cost than before, with greater freedom in concepts,allowing innovation into their business.

A small concept can now be spun up and piloted in a few days, making it a very cheap and efficient way to prototype, to make sure the big projects are worth the funding. Prototypes are now able to be proven to work and incorporated into the business quickly, or discarded as an idea that didn’t work, without being a hinderance to the organisation.

Covered in Crisis: Complete Disaster Recovery

With over 500 PSC staff in the field to roster and manage, a disaster under the previous system would have meant manually relying on paper until the system was restored. Not to include the risk of all the critical back-office information from billing, invoicing, and daily administration being unrecoverable due to data only being restored from when it was last backed-up by tape.

Disaster recovery (DR) was architecturally built into the design of the new system; this largely active -active and running - live disaster recovery component also allows for a quick system redirect, so that if the worst should happen and there is a system failure, there will be minimal disruption to the business. System restoration now takes between one to four hours, with little to no data loss, a marked decrease from the previous system where restoration could take anywhere from eight hours to a few days.

Supported by Fronde's Managed Services

As an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner and Channel Reseller Partner, Fronde has six years experience in leveraging the power of AWS for leading New Zealand businesses and government. Now with Fronde’s tiered Managed Services approach, companies like PSC are able optimise their spend and get the full benefits of Amazon Web Services.

By taking advantage of Fronde’s Managed Service, PSC are now equipped with local presence and knowledge. This service includes on-going support and maintenance of the cloud infrastructure solution, overlaid with continuous monitoring to ensure prompt action is taken when needed.

With a strong understanding of the unique challenges of operating in the public cloud, Fronde was able to offer PSC an AWS Managed Service to best match their needs. The Premium Managed Service provided by Fronde includes 24/7 operational support of PSC’s AWS infrastructure and priority access to additional expertise, allowing PSC to concentrate upon their core business and freeing their IT team to deliver innovation to their business.

“Our staff now feel like they are working on machines in front of them, when in fact they are working from four Citrix servers in Sydney.”

- Alan Lyford, IT Manager, PSC.

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*These case studies are from our archives. Exact publish dates are not known.