CABI Achieves Cost-effectiveness with Cloud Migration
Centre for Agriculture and Biosciences International (CABI) is an international not-for-profit organization that improves people´s lives worldwide by providing information and applying scientific expertise to solve problems in agriculture and the environment.
CABI´s approach involves putting information, skills and tools into people’s hands. The organization´s 48 member countries guide and influence the work, delivered by scientific staff from its network of global centers.
CABI
www.cabi.org
01. The Challenge
CABI was looking for a robust, stable and scalable infrastructure to deploy its ICT application which delivers actionable information to farmers around the world. The application pushes relevant, actionable information to subscribers across continents about quality of soil, invasive species, and pests and diseases to help improve livelihoods and increase production.
CABI wanted a solution that was cost-effective and delivered the best value for money. While a cloud-based infrastructure was appealing, the customer was not sure of its benefits and was hesitant to take the plunge. This was in early 2014, when the buzz around cloud was loud but adoption was still nascent in India.
02. The Solution
Looking for a partner to provide both technical and consultative assistance, CABI reached out to Umbrella Infocare. After understanding the business requirements, Umbrella educated the client about AWS offerings, its pricing models, price and performance optimizing models and the fundamentals about designing a robust, scalable and reliable architecture.
This convinced CABI Umbrella was the right partner to embark on its cloud journey. Umbrella designed a robust architecture which is secure, scalable, flexible and reliable. CABI is happy with the deployment, and has not faced any challenges in migration and in application performance.
Umbrella designed an architecture using EC2 to run the application, S3 for storing static information and RDS for storing information about farmers and Cloud Front for distributing video and images.
03. The Benefits
CABI is happy with Umbrella´s role as a trusted advisor. “Umbrella not only educated us about cloud and its benefits to embark on the cloud journey, but continues to guide us on optimizing performance and achieving cost savings. We are highly satisfied with our relationship with Umbrella and the value they provide in terms of our cloud deployment strategy. The application is running well, fulfilling our business objective,” says Nitesh Mann, Head of IT, India.
Umbrella also advised CABI to run its test and dev environment on AWS. Since AWS allows to build and destroy infrastructure in seconds, maintaining an on premise infrastructure that is occasionally used to test applications during development did not make sense. Instead moving dev & test function to AWS enabled CABI to convert its capital expenditure to an operating expenditure—an expense which is incurred only when a test is executed.
Going forward, CABI is exploring to expand its AWS deployment and run more workloads.
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