Ambra Health Uses AWS to Drive Global Expansion of Medical Imaging Platform

Growth is Ambra Health’s hallmark. Since its founding, the medical data and image-management software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider has grown to manage more than five billion medical images. Today, more than 425 hospitals, medical groups, imaging centers, and health information exchanges in North America use the Ambra Health platform to improve day-to-day workflows, store medical image, and speed up the delivery of patient care.

In recent years, Ambra Health set its sights on international expansion. Making that expansion a reality, however, was a major challenge because Ambra’s data centers are all in the United States. “We wanted to accommodate prospective customers in Canada, Europe, and Japan, but we didn’t have a fast or cost-effective way to get them up and running,” says Andrew Duckworth, vice president of business development for Ambra Health. “We didn’t want to have to build our own data centers globally and hire local teams to manage them.” The organization also had to consider the stringent data-protection requirements of some of the countries to which it wanted to expand. “Medical imaging data often has to be stored within the country or province that is acquiring the data,” Duckworth says. “We decided the AWS Cloud would be the best technology to meet our needs.”

"Using AWS, we can easily scale our medical-image management platform to meet the needs of healthcare customers worldwide. It was very easy to deploy and be operational globally."

Andrew Duckworth, Vice President of Business Development, Ambra Health

• About Ambra Health
• Benefits of AWS
• AWS Services Used

• Ambra Health, headquartered in New York City, is a software company that offers solutions for the managing and sharing of medical images and data between patients, physicians, and facilities. Ambra provides VNA, PACS, and image exchange solutions for healthcare customers across the globe.

Running a Global Platform on AWS

Ambra Health considered different cloud technologies before selecting Amazon Web Services (AWS). “With AWS, we felt the technology, brand recognition, and credibility would appeal to a broad range of international customers,” says Duckworth. “Additionally, AWS has comprehensive security and compliance certifications, which is critical for meeting medical imaging data requirements.”

Ambra Health has enabled its cloud-based vendor-neutral archive (VNA) platform—which stores medical images in both DICOM and non-DICOM formats from a range of imaging equipment in a single location—to run in the AWS Cloud. The company also now makes its SaaS picture archiving and communication system (PACS) platform available on the AWS Cloud for international customers.

The company runs both platforms on hundreds of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances and relies on Amazon Elastic Block Store(Amazon EBS) for persistent block storage volumes used with Amazon EC2 instances. Ambra Health also uses Amazon S3 Glacier for long-term storage of archived medical image data.

Using its AWS architecture, Ambra Health was able to replicate its on-premises U.S. disaster-recovery environment and easily scale it to fulfill the needs of its global customer base and drive current and future growth.

Fueling Global Expansion

By taking advantage of the scalability and global reach of AWS, Ambra Health was able to replicate its on-premises infrastructure on AWS and expand the VNA platform to new customers in Japan, Singapore, Germany, and Canada. “Using AWS, we can easily scale our medical image management platform to meet the needs of healthcare customers worldwide. It was very easy to deploy and be operational globally,” says Duckworth. “We didn’t have to put a lot of resources into building new data centers and training people to manage them.”

For example, MC Healthcare, one of the largest healthcare distributors in Japan, resells the Ambra Health platform to hospitals across Japan and now stores its medical images on AWS. “Previously, we wondered how we could possibly meet the growing imaging data needs of a large organization like MC Healthcare. Using AWS, that is no longer an issue,” says Duckworth.

Achieving Strict Data Protection

Ambra Health can meet its customers’ regional data privacy and protection needs by leveraging the global capabilities of AWS, such as the AWS Asia Pacific (Tokyo) Region and AWS security capabilities, to support the Ambra Health platform and keep customer data entirely within the country. “Security and compliance are the primary requirements for our customers when it comes to medical imaging data,” says Duckworth. “We can accomplish those goals by relying on the global reach of AWS and its strong compliance certifications. For example, all the imaging data managed in our platform by our customers in Japan must be stored in that country. We know we can meet that requirement by using AWS.”

Based on the success of its global expansion facilitated by AWS, Ambra recently started using AWS for expansion within the U.S. “We felt very confident, after our global expansion on AWS, that we could do the same for new domestic customers, especially those that requested we merge our platform into their existing AWS environments,” Duckworth says.

Ambra Health will continue to expand its capabilities by using technologies such as Amazon SageMaker to support new artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) capabilities. The company is also exploring the use of AWS AI and ML to automate the process of de-identifying Protected Health Information tags and anonymizing radiology reports. Duckworth concludes, “As we continue focusing on growing the business both globally and domestically, we know we can rely on the best-in-class scalability and security capabilities that AWS provides.”

AWS Amplify makes it easy to create, configure, and implement scalable mobile and web apps powered by AWS. Amplify seamlessly provisions and manages your mobile backend and provides a simple framework to easily integrate your backend with your iOS, Android, Web, and React Native frontends. Amplify also automates the application release process of both your frontend and backend allowing you to deliver features faster.

Mobile applications require cloud services for actions that can’t be done directly on the device, such as offline data synchronization, storage, or data sharing across multiple users. You often have to configure, set up, and manage multiple services to power the backend. You also have to integrate each of those services into your application by writing multiple lines of code. However, as the number of application features grow, your code and release process becomes more complex and managing the backend requires more time.

Amplify provisions and manages backends for your mobile applications. You just select the capabilities you need such as authentication, analytics, or offline data sync and Amplify will automatically provision and manage the AWS service that powers each of the capabilities. You can then integrate those capabilities into your application through the Amplify libraries and UI components.

Easy to use
AWS Amplify is the fastest and easiest way to build mobile applications on AWS. Amplify allows you quickly set up authentication, analytics, and offline data sync for your mobile applications with a few commands and integrate them into your application with a few lines of code.

Scale with your business

AWS Amplify leverages fully managed services like AWS AppSync, AWS Lambda, and others so you don’t need to provision or manage any infrastructure. Your application backend services scale as needed, and you only pay for
what you use.

Better customer engagement

AWS Amplify allows you to easily build engaging and interactive experiences for your customers. You can create voice and text interfaces powered by Amazon Lex, add virtual reality scenes created with Amazon Sumerian, or target your users with push notifications with just a few lines of code.

Amplify Framework

The Amplify Framework provides a set of libraries, UI components, and a command line interface to build a mobile backend and integrate with your iOS, Android, Web, and React Native apps. The Amplify CLI allows you to configure all the services needed to power your backend through a simple command line interface. The Amplify library makes it easy to integrate your code with your backend using declarative interfaces and simple UI components.

Get Started

Cloud Services

Amplify leverages a core set of AWS services organized into categories—including offline data, authentication, analytics, push notifications, bots, and AR/VR.

Data

Query, store, and sync application data in real-time with features such as online and offline data access, data manipulation across multiple data sources, and GraphQL support.

Learn more >>

Authentication

Add user sign-up, sign-in, and access control to mobile and web applications.

Learn more >>

Analytics

Drop-in analytics to track user sessions, attributes, and in-app metrics

Notifications

Integrate tailored push notifications with analytics and targeting built-in.

Bots

Create conversational interfaces using voice and text powered by deep learning.

Storage

Manage user content securely in the cloud or on the device.

API

Make HTTP requests using REST and GraphQL easily and securely.

AR & VR

Integrate virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and 3D scenes easily.

By using AWS for our new IoT platform, we saved 80 percent in development cost. It also enables developers to focus on writing business logic for LG service scenarios.

Kim KunwooChief of the Service Development Team, LG Cloud Center, LG Electronics

About LG Electronics

In December 2017, LG Electronics (LG) announced the launch of its LG ThinQ (ThinQ) brand to categorize all its upcoming smart products and services, which feature artificial intelligence (AI) technology. The concept of ThinQ is to embed Wi-Fi chips in LG products, which allows these products to communicate with each other while learning about their user’s behavioral patterns and environments. To date, LG has sold more than 70 million smart TVs and five million home appliances around the globe.

The Challenge

As the sale of its Wi-Fi-enabled products increased, the activation rate for LG’s smart appliances increased concurrently, which led to a burden on its servers on premises. This growth called for a new platform that could accommodate an increasing number of smart devices connected to LG servers. As such, LG built an Internet of Things (IoT) platform for ThinQ appliances, but experienced difficulties in securing resources for server development and operations.

In LG’s search to ensure reliable device connectivity, the company constantly reviewed new technologies that were compatible with its existing services aside from ThinQ. LG looked to migrate its IoT platform to a new infrastructure that was easy to manage, secure, and cost-effective.

Why Amazon Web Services

In 2016, LG successfully migrated its IT platform for home appliances, including more than 1,000 servers, from its data center to Amazon Web Services (AWS). The business adopted Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service(Amazon S3).

In 2017, LG learned about AWS IoT and its serverless architecture. LG decided to use AWS IoT based on an understanding that this would reduce management time for its IoT platform. In addition, AWS was the only cloud provider whose IoT services could meet LG’s requirements to support the ThinQ platform.

The company then began using AWS IoT Core to maintain continuous connectivity between ThinQ devices and its IoT platform. LG also started using AWS Lambda (Lambda) for serverless computing that registers ThinQ devices on the cloud, stores device data, and controls device status information.

For authentication between ThinQ devices and its IoT platform’s servers, LG uses X.509 certificates. The ThinQ platform also stores data in Amazon ElastiCache and Amazon DynamoDB, which provide historical data for services. “With the previous infrastructure, we retrieved data directly from devices to get status information. Now, the Device Shadow Service feature for AWS IoT enables the system to cache the status information from the server. This feature has made it possible to deliver better service consistency,” says Kunwoo Kim, chief of the Service Development Team at the LG Cloud Center.

The diagram below illustrates the LG Electronics architecture on AWS:

The Benefits

Because of the managed services and AWS IoT Core, LG was able to relaunch its IoT platform with a modest number of development resources. “By using AWS for our IoT platform, we saved 80 percent in development cost. It also enabled developers to focus on writing business logic for LG service scenarios,” says Mr. Kim.

“Our infrastructure team and development team operated separately, resulting in miscommunication and inefficiencies when it came to infrastructure allocation. With AWS, developers can improve efficiency by building the infrastructure themselves and then consulting with our infrastructure team when development work is almost complete,” says Mr. Kim.

LG is also using AWS IoT and a serverless architecture for air-quality monitoring services, customer service chatbots, and energy solutions. Since March 2018, a chatbot service for customer support that was developed using serverless services has been running in Korea and the United States.

The business is working with AWS solutions architects to resolve issues with its cloud infrastructure. "We found that it was better to receive help from AWS solutions architects compared to solving problems ourselves. AWS is a great solution for customers because AWS enables developers to focus on their core tasks, like writing business logic and running test environments. We have plans to continue using AWS services for other projects in the future,” says Mr. Kim.

About Ramco

Established in 1999, Ramco Systems provides enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions for more than 1,000 companies across 35 countries. The company’s vision is to enhance the competitive capabilities and value proposition of its customers by leveraging new technologies and expanding global connectivity. Ramco Systems currently has more than 150,000 users and 17 offices in the United States, Canada, Europe, India, Middle East, South Africa and Asia Pacific.

The Challenge

Ramco needed to be able to provision servers quickly for its customers and meet the service-level agreements (SLAs) that the company offers its customers for backup and disaster recovery. At the time, Ramco ran its own data center and had to contend with the high cost of power, capital expenditures, and security. Ramco began to look for a service provider that could provide a cost-effective environment and meet the company’s need for high availability, resiliency and security.

Why Amazon Web Services

“We were won over by the extensive portfolio of service offerings, and the low-cost, secure, and reliable infrastructure of Amazon Web Services (AWS),” says Virender Aggarwal, CEO of Ramco Systems. “We saw that Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Reserved Instances could provide long-term savings and that AWS is constantly focusing on how to make its services more cost-efficient for its customers. Furthermore, AWS tools can help us manage and optimize the servers in our environment."

In addition to Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances, the Ramco IT team is currently using Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Route 53, AWS Direct Connect, Elastic Load Balancing, and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud(Amazon VPC) to provision and manage its server environment. Ramco uses Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) for messaging services and Amazon CloudWatch for monitoring resources.

The Benefits

“On the technical front, we are able to provision, monitor and manage Amazon EC2 instances very easily,” says Aggarwal. “We have been able to provide disaster recovery sites for our customers and we have started to use Amazon S3 for our production backups and archives. Migrating to the AWS Cloud has reduced both our capital and operating expenditures by more than 40 percent compared to our on-premises data center.”

Additionally, Ramco has noticed improved customer access to their ERP solutions since migrating to AWS. Aggarwal explains, “We are able to scale on demand, which improves our server provisioning time by over 80 percent. With AWS, our global customers get to experience a flexible, scalable, comprehensive and powerful ERP solution running on the AWS Cloud, with reliable, secure and cost-effective backup and recovery.”

“Globally, there is a surging demand for functionally rich, enterprise class solutions on the cloud,” he continues. “We are confident that by leveraging AWS, with its secure infrastructure, Ramco will be able to deliver cloud offerings that bring unmatched value to our customers.”

Aircel Enhances Speed of Software Deployment by More Than 50% Using AWS

By building the Aircel Backup app on AWS, we reduced development time by about 60%.

Dr. Uttam KumarSenior General Manager – IT, Aircel

• Aircel needed a scalable, reliable, and secure IT infrastructure that would support regulatory guidelines for electronic wallets
• The company is running its Aircel e-money platform and Aircel Backup app on AWS
• Increases speed of development by 60%
• Enhances speed of software deployment by more than 50%
• Achieves 99.999% service reliability
• Ensures the scalability to meet traffic peaks
• Gains the security needed to comply with regulations of the financial services industry

About Aircel

Aircel is an India mobile service provider with a strong focus on delivering innovative services to its customers. The company is a pan-India 2G operator with 3G spectrum in 13 India states. The company has won numerous awards including Voice & Data Special Leadership Recognition in the ‘Customer Service’ category at the ET Telecom Awards 2014 in India. Aircel is headquartered in Gurgaon in the state of Haryana, India.

The Challenge

India is one of the largest and fastest-growing smartphone markets in the world with 300 million smartphone users and more than 27.5 million devices sold in the second quarter of 2016, as reported by IDC. As a network provider competing for the millions of smartphone users in India, Aircel seeks to distinguish itself from other network providers through its portfolio of services and price plans.

As part of its portfolio of services, Aircel provides the Aircel e-money platform, which enables customers to recharge mobile data cards, pay bills, make payments, and transfer funds to any bank account. To better support continued development, Aircel wanted to migrate the Aircel e-money platform from a hosted environment to the cloud. The company also wanted to launch Aircel Backup, an Android-based mobile app which would provide customers with 2 gigabytes of free storage for files, messages, audio, and video for their mobile devices.

For both products, Aircel needed a reliable cloud infrastructure, scalable enough to traffic peaks. Crucially for Aircel, the cloud’s security would need to support regulatory guidelines for electronic wallets from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), India’s central banking monetary authority. Dr. Uttam Kumar, senior general manager – IT, says, “Besides RBI compliance, scalability, and reliability, the backend IT for our apps had to be cost-effective. We wanted to avoid any management overheads. Our aim was to work with an infrastructure that enabled us to focus on product development rather than day-to-day administration and operations.”

Why Amazon Web Services

Aircel looked to engage with a cloud-service provider that could deliver the requirements for the backend infrastructures of the Aircel e-money platform and Aircel Backup app. Dr. Kumar determined that Amazon Web Services (AWS) could help Aircel meet the RBI security guidelines for e-money services. “I saw that AWS Cloud had proven itself in terms of its reliability and security by other providers of electronic wallets. Furthermore, AWS offered very competitively priced storage and this made our Aircel Backup idea viable.”

Aircel began work with the AWS team along with To The New, an AWS Partner Network (APN) Advanced Consulting Partner, to design and build the backend infrastructure for Aircel Money. For their storage app, Aircel worked directly with the AWS team. To The New would also manage the AWS infrastructure for the Aircel e-money platform on behalf of Aircel. Says Dr. Kumar, “We followed a recommended architecture for our AWS infrastructure, which meant there were no technical issues with both solutions. It was a very smooth process when the apps went live.”

Both the Aircel e-money service and Aircel Backup app run on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances. This includes the apps’ web servers and databases. Storage for the Aircel Backup app is provided via Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). The company uses Amazon CloudWatch to monitor the performance of both apps and to raise an alarm if performance falls below set thresholds. It also uses AWS CloudTrail to record application programming interface (API) calls and to deliver log files.

The Benefits

Aircel successfully migrated the Aircel e-money service to AWS and launched Aircel Backup. Says Dr. Kumar, “By building the Aircel Backup app on AWS, we reduced development time by about 60 percent.” The AWS infrastructure behind both apps delivers 99.999 percent availability—crucial to Aircel customers. Dr. Kumar says, “The availability of our AWS infrastructure is vital because we would be liable for financial penalties from RBI if there were downtime. It’s also important to remember that, above all else, customers are looking for reliability from our apps. The stability of the AWS infrastructure enables us to deliver a high level of customer satisfaction.”

“We can easily auto-scale our AWS infrastructure to meet traffic peaks on the Aircel e-money platform and then scale the infrastructure down during quieter times,” says Kumar. In addition, because Aircel pays only for the AWS resources it consumes, the AWS infrastructure is highly cost-effective. “Compared with an on-premises solution, AWS has significantly reduced our costs,” Dr. Kumar says. Taking advantage of the AWS Cloud also gives his team of developers the flexibility to work more efficiently than they could if they were using an on-premises infrastructure. Says Dr. Kumar, “We have increased our speed of software deployment by more than 50 percent, helping us drive innovation.”

About Dow Jones

New York-based Dow Jones & Company is a global provider of news and business information, delivering content to consumers and organizations via newspapers, Web sites, mobile apps, video, newsletters, magazines, proprietary databases, conferences, and radio. One of the world’s largest news-gathering operations, the company employs nearly 2,000 journalists in more than 50 countries. Dow Jones owns The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, MarketWatch, and DJX, its flagship news and analytics platform. Dow Jones publishes in 13 languages and distributes content in 28 languages, combining technology with news and data to support business decision making. The company pioneered the first successful paid online news site, and its industry-leading innovation enables it to serve customers wherever they may be, via the Web, mobile devices, Internet-connected televisions, and tablets.

News Corp Discusses Plans for Migrating Data Centers to AWS (4:51)

The Challenge

Investors use Dow Jones to learn about what’s happening in financial markets throughout the world. “Our mission is to shine a light on dark corners of the world, focusing on news that impacts decision making,” says Stephen Orban, Chief Information Officer & Global Head of Technology. The company relies on cutting-edge technology to keep its customers as up to date as possible on the latest news.

In Asia, about 12.8 million people use WSJ.com, which generates about 90 million page views each month. When the lease on its Asian data center ran out in early 2013, the company needed to find an alternative that would help its developers focus more on revenue-generating applications instead of on data center maintenance. Dow Jones also wanted to reduce latency for its Asia-based customers—and it wanted to avoid delays for acquiring and configuring hardware. “My preference is to have my team build products rather than running data centers, Orban says. “Now that data center is a commodity, that’s exactly what they’re able to do.”

Why Amazon Web Services

Dow Jones chose AWS because it helps enable the company improve time to market for its products. “Our applications were dependent on a particular database version,” Orban says, “and a lot of redirect logic was done on a hardware load balancer. All of the non-AWS software we use work on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), making it possible to lift and shift, and work on optimizing the environment down the road.”

It took the company about six weeks to move from its Hong Kong data center to AWS. The WSJ.com product running on AWS Tokyo leverages multiple Availability Zones on Amazon EC2 instances to run Dow Jones app code and Oracle databases. Elastic Load Balancing instances are used to route application traffic between services, third-party load balancers are used to balance user traffic, and WAN accelerators are used to improve database replication. Dow Jones is also using Amazon CloudWatch, AWS Identity and Access Management (Amazon IAM), and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC).

The company also uses AWS for DJ Chat, an internal application that allows registered users to chat with one another. The app includes content sharing and video conferencing. The company plans to release DJ Chat inside its customer facing products in the coming months.

The Benefits

Dow Jones is now running all its Asia traffic through AWS. “Using AWS helps Dow Jones to be more agile in developing revenue-generating products,” Orban says. “Thanks to AWS, we now build more products and spend less time running a data center. Our overall product development velocity has increased by at least 30 percent.”

Orban anticipates further improvements to come. “Network connectivity to Asia over the Internet isn’t always optimal,” he says, and high latency or packet loss can lead to intermittent application problems and stale content. Engaging resources to isolate those types of problems is time consuming and distracts from building new features. Hardware failures and refresh are a challenge to manage remotely. Using AWS relieves us of most of this burden.”

The company has also realized cost savings of 25 percent, more than $40,000 per year, over the cost of leasing a data center—and the savings will continue each year that they use AWS. “We’ll never have to refresh the hardware. That constitutes significant savings for Dow Jones,” Orban says.

“Using AWS gives us the freedom to be agile,” Orban continues. “Why would I want to spend my time learning how to operate a database or a Hadoop cluster when I can have predictable costs on the AWS Cloud and avoid unnecessary operational responsibility?”

Moving forward, the company plans to expand the number of AWS-powered apps it offers in its products. DJ Chat, which will be released later this year, accounts for tens of thousands of messages a day and has thousands of users logged in at any given time. In addition, Dow Jones is working on a content personalization algorithm to run on AWS and building analytics tools to suggest content and trending topics to customers who might be interested.

The culture shift and cloud migration are allowing Dow Jones to take more risks. “Designing for high availability in one’s discrete data center is hard—it leads to very complex designs and heavy processes, which tends to make people risk-averse. Using AWS makes it much simpler to design for availability. It’s also a relief to not be preoccupied with capacity concerns, which are nearly impossible to predict for new products.”

Next Step

To learn more about how AWS can help you run your digital media applications, visit our Digital Media details page: http://aws.amazon.com/digital-media/.

A Shared File System should be easy to set up and scale to your needs as you grow, with minimal effort. Taking advantage of Amazon EFS, our customers can deploy JIRA Data Center clusters through CloudFormation templates with only a few clicks.
Brad Bressler, Technical Account ManagerAtlassian

About Atlassian

Atlassian is an enterprise-software company that project managers, software developers, and content managers use to work more effectively in teams. Its primary application is an issue-tracking solution called JIRA. Atlassian has more than 1,800 employees serving more than 68,000 customers and millions of users.

The Challenge

At Atlassian, growth is on a fast track. The company adds more customers every day and consequently needed an easy way to scale JIRA, which is growing by 15,000 support tickets every month. The instance supporting this site was previously hosted in a data center, which created challenges for scaling. “The scale at which we were growing made it difficult to quickly add nodes to the application,” says Brad Bressler, technical account manager for Atlassian. “This is our customer-facing instance, which gathers all the support tickets for our products globally. It’s one of the largest JIRA instances in the world, and growing and maintaining it on premises was getting harder to do.” For example, the support.atlassian.com instance was hosted on a single on-premises server, which the company needed to frequently take down for maintenance.

The company also needed to ensure high availability for JIRA. “This is a mission-critical application, and the number of customers potentially impacted by downtime is huge,” says Neal Riley, principal solutions engineer for Atlassian. “As we grew, we became more concerned about the resiliency and disaster-recovery capabilities of the data center.”

To move into a more scalable, highly available environment, Atlassian created JIRA Data Center, a new enterprise version of the application. However, JIRA Data Center required shared storage. “We needed a shared file system so the individual application nodes could have a shared source of truth for profile information, plug-ins, and attachments,” says Riley.

Why Amazon Web Services

Atlassian also needed to respond to customers wanting to run JIRA on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. “We initially looked at several vendors, but AWS was the clear leader,” Bressler says. “We needed automatic scaling and reliability, and AWS offered us that.” The company migrated JIRA Data Center to the AWS Cloud, running all application nodes on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances. Atlassian takes advantage of Auto Scaling groups to enable automatic scaling of both applications, and uses Elastic Load Balancing to redirect application traffic to Amazon EC2 instances for consistent performance.

After evaluating several options for JIRA shared storage on AWS, Atlassian chose to use Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) to support attachments and log-application files for support.atlassian.com. “Amazon EFS gives us an easy way to scale our customer-facing instances of JIRA, so our teams can more quickly jump on support cases,” says Bressler.

The company then created an AWS CloudFormation template for deploying JIRA Data Center on AWS. Atlassian also takes advantage of Amazon CloudWatch to monitor JIRA. “We’re using CloudWatch to monitor RAM usage and bandwidth, so we can more easily optimize the application,” says Bressler. Because the company believes in using its own software, Atlassian also deploys JIRA Data Center for internal support tickets, which it runs on AWS.

The Benefits

Prior to using Amazon EFS as a shared file system for JIRA Data Center, Atlassian tested the solution internally. During testing, the company discovered the technology was simple to set up and enabled consistent throughput and capacity that stayed within threshold. “Once we went live, everything worked exactly as we expected it to,” says Bressler. “It was performant, resilient, and easy to set up, and it is easy to maintain.”

Using Amazon EFS, Atlassian customers can now run an enterprise version of JIRA in the cloud. “A Shared File System should be easy to set up and scale to your needs as you grow, with minimal effort,” says Bressler. “Taking advantage of Amazon EFS, our customers can deploy JIRA Data Center clusters through CloudFormation templates with only a few clicks.”

Because it can more easily manage its JIRA instances in the cloud, Atlassian is putting more effort into enhancing applications. “By moving to the AWS Cloud, our company has been able to focus more on what we do well: providing great services to our customers,” says Bressler. “Instead of having to spend time on managing the back-end application stack, we can really step up our game and better support our tens of thousands of global customers.”

By moving to the cloud, Atlassian is also able to efficiently grow JIRA Data Center. “We can much more rapidly scale our application using Amazon EFS and Auto Scaling,” says Riley. “If we had an event that required us to add 10,000 customers, it would previously have taken weeks, if not months, to plan for it because of the complexity. Using AWS, we have everything in place to support that traffic immediately.”

Atlassian is better supporting its customers by utilizing the built-in disaster recovery and high availability of AWS. “We have better disaster-recovery capabilities and better uptime because our application data is replicated across multiple AWS Availability Zones,” says Riley. “If our application instances go down, we’re stopping thousands of people from getting support. By moving to a highly available platform on AWS, we are much more confident that our solutions are available at all times.”

The company will likely migrate more applications to AWS in the coming months. Riley says, “We trust in AWS to help us grow our company in a flexible and cost-effective way, and we will be expanding our relationship with AWS well into the future.”

Expedia Increases Agility and Resiliency by Going All In on AWS

Expedia is all in on AWS, with plans to migrate 80 percent of its mission-critical apps from its on-premises data centers to the cloud in the next two to three years. By using AWS, Expedia has become more resilient. Expedia’s developers have been able to innovate faster while saving the company millions of dollars. Expedia provides travel-booking services across its flagship site Expedia.com and about 200 other travel-booking sites around the world.

AWS re:Invent 2017 – Mark Okerstrom Shares How Expedia Has Become More Agile by Going All In on AWS

The flexibility of Amazon Connect lets us add new features in weeks instead of the three to six months that our last solution required.”

Rajiv SondhiVice President for Software Engineering and Digital Technologies, Capital One

• AWS Services Used

  • Amazon Connect
  • Amazon Simple Storage Service
  • Amazon Redshift
  • Amazon Kinesis
  • AWS Lambda

• Benefits of AWS

To best understand Capital One and its long-term strategy, it helps to think of the company not as a bank—despite the fact that the diversified financial services company is, in fact, one of the ten largest U.S. banks by assets and deposits—but as a digital technology company that offers banking services. At Capital One, the central motivating belief is that the winners in next-generation banking will be the companies that make the most creative and innovative use of technology to provide seamless, intelligent, truly excellent customer experiences.

That’s why Capital One has a cloud-first policy, in which all new applications are architected for and deployed in the cloud, and that’s why the company is using data analytics and machine learning to better understand customer feedback and intent.

It’s also why the company moved to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and deployed the Amazon Connect cloud-based contact center service.

Capital One Contact Centers Innovate Faster Using Amazon Connect

Meeting Customers Where They Are

Every day, Capital One receives thousands of calls from its banking customers. "Each call is a chance to live our mission of bringing simplicity, ingenuity, and humanity to banking," says Rajiv Sondhi, vice president of software engineering Capital One. "That mission is powered by our strategic use of technology."

The key word is "strategic." Although Capital One was an early leader in web and mobile banking services and was the first company to give its customers the ability to manage their financial accounts through any Amazon Alexa-enabled device, the company doesn’t do tech for tech’s sake. Instead, Capital One is focused on how technology can enable it to create great customer experiences.

"Our focus is on serving customers the way they want to be served," says Sondhi. "We are constantly researching new technologies, but we know our voice channel remains crucial for many customers and situations."

Time for a New Contact-Center Solution

Although the company’s previous-generation contact-center solution had served it well, Capital One wanted to further speed innovation by replacing it with a system that would integrate more easily with other company systems and support simpler, faster change processes. Sondhi’s team was researching possible candidates when they learned of an option, Amazon Connect, that would perfectly fit the company’s long-term goals of reducing its datacenter footprint, increasing its use of microservices, and building a more open, integrated architecture.

Amazon Connect offers crystal-clear sound quality and lets even nontechnical users easily design flows, manage agents, analyze performance metrics, and serve intuitive interactive voice response (IVR) menus. It’s also simple to integrate Amazon Connect with other tools and services, including Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to store call recordings, Amazon Kinesis to stream metrics to data warehousing solutions like Amazon Redshift, and AWS Lambda to interact with backend systems and APIs. Speech-to-text transcription makes call content available for search and analysis by natural-language-processing tools. With no per-seat cost, Capital One only pays for Amazon Connect when its associates are taking calls.

Although Sondhi was accustomed to easy deployments on AWS, he was impressed by how simple and fast it was to first pilot and then roll out Amazon Connect. "In a proof-of-concept phase that lasted about three business days, I was able to bring Amazon Connect up, take a simple call flow, and seamlessly integrate with our CRM system," says Sondhi. "Once we started putting Amazon Connect into production, we trained hundreds of associates in just 30 minutes each and achieved 100 percent adoption for our direct bank and fraud operations in just five months. That’s more than twice as fast as prior migrations of this magnitude have taken."

Customer Value in the AWS Cloud

For customer-obsessed Capital One, the biggest benefits of Amazon Connect are faster innovation, seamless customer experience, and ease of use. “Amazon Connect is helping us capture customer intent and provide an even more seamless, personalized customer experience,” says Jared Wall, the vice president for bank contact center channels at Capital One. “In just a few months on Amazon Connect, we’re already improving customer outcomes and overall business agility, and this is just the beginning.”

Amazon Connect makes it easier for Capital One to not only continuously strengthen and fine-tune the contact center experience but also identify customer needs across the business. "By integrating Amazon Connect with natural language processing tools, we get more insight into why customers are calling, what new features they want, how to make calls more efficient for customers, and what new customer-service tools our associates need," says Sondhi. "Inside the contact center, the flexibility of Amazon Connect lets us add new features in weeks instead of the months that our last solution required."

The ease of integrating Amazon Connect with other services and technologies helps make Capital One customer service even stronger and more flexible. "No matter which channel our customers use—our branches, Capital One Cafes, our mobile app, or a contact center—we want a seamless experience," says Sondhi. "Because Amazon Connect integrates with our larger ecosystem, our associates have the information they need to meet our customers where they are and exceed their expectations in all settings."

None of these benefits would matter, of course, if call quality were poor or if unwieldy menus prevented customers from finding fast answers, but Amazon Connect ticks these boxes with ease. "One associate told me that the call and sound quality are so much clearer than the old system that it sounds as if the customer is right next to you,” says Sondhi. “We’re also hearing great feedback from customers about the time they’re saving with the intuitive IVR menus and the virtual hold with callbacks."

Capital One has no concerns about scale when it extends Amazon Connect to the company’s other lines of business. "We have already experienced Amazon Connect seamless scaling without manual intervention as we have doubled initial call volume. Once we deploy it companywide, Amazon Connect will be handling about 25 times the number of agents, calls, and processes that it handles trouble-free today," says Sondhi. "We have no doubt that, just like all the other AWS services we use, Amazon Connect will be able to scale up as much and as fast as we need and support continued innovation and seamless customer experiences across the entire company.” 

"How to Cloud" with Capital One

How Capital One Reduced its Data-Center Footprint, Expanded its Use of Microservices, and Reimagined Banking Using AWS

How Capital One Reduced its Data-Center Footprint, Expanded its Use of Microservices, and Reimagined Banking Using AWS

In everything we do at Capital One, we always start from what our customers need and work back from there to figure out how to give it to them. The most important benefit of working with AWS is that we don’t have to worry about building and operating the infrastructure necessary to do that and can instead focus our time, money, and energy on creating great experiences for our customers.

George BradyExecutive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Capital One

To Cloud or Not to Cloud?

Cloud computing, a mature technology now in its second decade, has a clear track record of helping businesses of all types and sizes maximize speed and agility, shift valuable resources away from IT operations, and sharpen their focus on innovating and building new customer value. As a result, it’s getting easier and easier for many businesses that aren’t currently in the cloud to decide to start heading there.

Many businesses—but not all.

"Larger enterprises are always going to have a certain amount of resistance to such a big change," says George Brady, executive vice president and chief technology officer at Capital One. "That’s especially true at financial institutions, where legacy core systems, complex operating rules, and extensive compliance requirements can make people reluctant to move to the cloud.

So how did Capital One get to the point where, in 2015, it announced that all new company applications would run in—and all existing applications would be systematically rearchitected for—the cloud? Although Capital One, a technology company that offers financial services, is different in important ways from other companies in its industry, its path to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud and its cloud-first approach to software development offers useful tips for large, non-cloud-native, highly-regulated enterprises mapping out their own cloud journeys.

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Capital One Reimagines Banking Using AWS

At Capital One, It’s All About the Customer

Before describing the path Capital One followed to the cloud, however, Brady says it’s important to understand why the company set out on that path in the first place.

"Throughout our history as a company, our overriding focus has always been on transforming and optimizing the banking customer experience," he explains. "Capital One scientists, engineers, and designers spend a lot of time thinking about how the latest technologies can help us do that."

It was no surprise, then, that the company was already evaluating cloud computing when Brady joined Capital One in 2014.

"We had a fledgling private cloud capability, and our engineers were also experimenting with AWS," he says. "The basic question was whether it made more sense to devote resources to building and operating our own cloud infrastructure or to move to the public cloud so that we could focus on building and releasing the new features and products our customers want. Given the level of customer obsession at Capital One, that question pretty much answered itself."

Do the Hard Part First

Even though that first question was simple to answer, it opened the door to more complicated ones—about security, compliance, and how to effect the needed culture change. In other words, Capital One was now at the point in its cloud journey where many large enterprises begin to flounder.

Brady, who brought three decades of experience on enterprise technology teams when he joined Capital One, knew that the reasonable-sounding tactic of taking baby steps can sometimes spell doom for a big company’s "cloudification" goals.

"Many companies approach the cloud by trying to solve easy problems first, such as by putting isolated parts of the business on the cloud with the hope that this will make it easier to tackle the bigger issues down the road," Brady says. "We turned that on its head by deciding to solve the hardest problems first. We didn’t want to be in the position of trying to convince stakeholders of the value of the cloud without being able to first assure them that we could responsibly deploy and run any of our applications there."

That meant tackling questions about security early and head on. "As a financial institution, we take the safety of our customer data incredibly seriously," says Brady. "Before we moved a single workload, we engaged groups from across the company to build a risk framework for the cloud that met the same high bar for security and compliance that we meet in our on-premises environments. AWS worked with us every step of the way."

To implement the resulting cloud risk framework, Capital One relied on both people and technology. "One key early step we took was to establish a cloud governance function, consisting of risk managers and cloud engineers, to curate capabilities and controls that would keep us well managed as we moved applications into the cloud," says Brady, adding that this team has continued to update and refine the cloud-risk-control framework quarterly. "We developed and open-sourced a compliance-enforcement engine called Cloud Custodian, to automate detection and correction of policy violations so we could keep our teams inside the guardrails without restricting their ability to work creatively and innovate for our customers. We also built a reporting portal where we can see and measure compliance in the entire fleet of services throughout our complex, multi-account environment."

Planning and Education: Two More Keys to the Cloud

Long-term planning and a focus on education were the other main enablers of the successful Capital One cloudification strategy.

"In order for all stakeholders to feel comfortable with a big change like this one, it really helps to have a long-term view of where you’re trying to go, and why," Brady says. "Right at the beginning, we developed a five-year road map that aligned our use of the AWS Cloud with the company’s long-term business strategy. Being able to point to the value we were going to be able to get out of the cloud was key to getting company leaders on board and turning them into cloud champions themselves. Our most effective arguments were around how the cloud supports faster innovation, saving and finding value in more data, faster recovery from failures, and shifting resources from operations to higher value work."

Carefully tailored training programs were another tool Brady and his team used to establish and maintain broad support for the company’s cloud journey. "For a successful cloud project, you must make sure that anyone who can influence it understands what you’re doing and why," he says. "Obviously, you need to train engineers and developers in how to use the new tools. But you also have to make sure that business executives understand how exciting the cloud is for their business goals if they’re going to be willing to make the significant investments you need to keep moving the ball down the field."

The Clear Benefits of the Cloud

Now that Capital One has been cloud–first for several years—as part of a larger long-term strategy of reducing the company’s data center footprint and expanding its use of microservices—the company no longer has to speak prospectively about the value of operating in the cloud and can instead point to concrete benefits. By using AWS, Capital One is powering agile DevOps processes that help it bring new features and products to market in weeks instead of months or years; feeding data to and providing powerful model training for cutting-edge machine-learning analysis and customer-service solutions; integrating its contact centers with its CRM and other key company systems; and attracting top entry-level and mid-career developers and engineers with the prospect of learning about and innovating on the latest cloud technologies.

At customer-obsessed Capital One, however, none of that would matter if the company couldn’t point to how AWS is directly benefitting its customers. Brady says that’s not a problem.

"In everything we do at Capital One, we always start from what our customers need and work back from there to figure out how to give it to them," he explains. "The most important benefit of working with AWS is that we don’t have to worry about building and operating the infrastructure necessary to do that and can instead focus our time, money, and energy on creating great experiences for our customers."