Magnasoft Northstar is a provider of comprehensive, integrated child and school bus tracking and monitoring solution. The services enable children's safety and security when they travel to and from school.

During the beta phase, Magnasoft Northstar hosted and managed dedicated hardware on its own. But this had its own set of challenges in terms of increasing capex and inability to scale, which led to the adoption of cloud. The human resource thus freed were put to efficient use on advancing business and providing better quality of service and agility to customers at lower prices and become a force to reckon with amongst competition.

TECH DUE DILIGENCE

Before evaluating the solutions by different vendors, MagnaSoft NorthStar team laid down some parameters aimed at zeroing on the right and best solution available in the market. In the end it took the cloud plunge. It also created a roadmap and listed its expectations from the cloud roll out. The key considerations were:

THE EUREKA MOMENT

After screening various solutions, the management identified that Amazon Web Services (AWS) as the right solution. According to company sources, the key considerations for choosing AWS were pricing, support, reliability, and technology agnosticism. AWS won on all parameters, with the cost-effective plan and a huge set of AMIs that helped to pick the right technology platform with ease.

"Moving to the AWS cloud platform, we have experienced savings of 40% versus renting or purchasing dedicated hardware and hosting it ourselves. We were also able to go to market 60% faster with our roll-outs. It enabled us to push out our new releases in a matter of a few hours down from three days," adds Kunal Ashar, Head of Product Development Division, Magnasoft Northstar. He further adds, "As we continue to add over 100GB of new data every week, using Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) has helped us save 70% in new RAID hardware."

With this, Magnasoft Northstar can provide updates to customers from 85% (on-premise hosting) to 100%. However, with AWS, the deployment, management, and monitoring of very large infrastructure is handled and maintained by just a fraction of the human resources required as compared to a traditional box & wire' data center-based infrastructure. This is because a significant amount of automation is enabled by the likes of monitoring services offered by Amazon CloudWatch which aims to build auto-scaling triggers into the application layer itself.

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