“And, the migration had no negative user impact. “Amazon gave us such great speeds with AWS Direct Connect that we were able to push all the data in a little more than one quarter,” says Paranandi. “It was easy to develop the talent we needed in house,” says Paranandi. Hightail has also found that training its internal team to work with AWS was a straightforward process using Amazon conferences, training materials, and support. “We have a couple of their technicians available 24/7 via chat, which is essential when doing a large-scale migration.” “The support from AWS has been pretty awesome,” says Paranandi. Part of Hightail’s success stems from the support provided by the AWS team. “We did a lot of internal testing to ensure zero user impact, such as making sure that checksums between our data center and the data that got pushed to AWS were the same.” says Paranandi. Hightail performed extensive testing before flipping users over to the AWS solution. “With the cost savings and ecosystem provided by AWS, we didn’t need anyone else.” “As a strategy, a multi-vendor approach might seem like a good idea, but when you factor in training, synchronization, support, system availability, and so on, it’s just not practical,” says Paranandi. “We can share with them how we keep the data secure in AWS, and how it enables us to maintain SOC II compliance.” The company is also beginning to use AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) for data encryption both in transit and at rest.Īt one point, Hightail considered combining services from multiple cloud providers to meet its needs, but ultimately decided to use AWS exclusively. “Data sovereignty and security are concerns for our customers,” says Paranandi. Security and compliance were also important considerations. Going with AWS actually made things easier and, in many cases, gave us better functionality than what we were using in house.” The migration was smooth and fast using AWS Direct Connect. The same goes for the tools we use to keep track of our own system. “If we went with a different vendor, it would have meant moving a lot of bytes for each user interaction. “All the other vendors we depend on for services such as previewing images, encoding videos, and serving up PowerPoint presentations are also on AWS,” says Paranandi. However, cost was only one of many benefits that contributed to Hightail’s decision.Īmong these was the rich ecosystem of partner solutions available on AWS. Price was one key reason, as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) offered the lowest storage cost per GB. Why Amazon Web ServicesĪfter closely evaluating several cloud vendors including Google, IBM, and Microsoft Azure, Hightail chose to go all-in with Amazon Web Services (AWS). The company hoped to reduce costs by keeping infrequently accessed data in less expensive “cold storage,” yet it also needed to be able to serve that information to customers quickly if requested. However, much of that content was not actively used by customers. Because its customers collaborate on large files such as images, videos, PDFs, and presentations, Hightail had multiple petabytes of stored content to migrate. Hightail needed a storage solution that was both tiered and highly scalable. It wanted to be able to scale up in any given region quickly while providing high-performance services close to users. Setting up a data center in a new region typically took two full quarters, limiting the pace of growth Hightail could achieve. “We needed a new approach that would help us iterate more rapidly to meet customer needs.”Īdditionally, the company has customers spread out across the globe, from North America to Australia. “Having our own data centers required us to build our own tooling and limited our flexibility,” says Shiva Paranandi, senior vice president of technology at Hightail. In keeping with this strategy, the company seeks to invest more time and money in creating intuitive, powerful customer experiences, and less on managing storage and computing infrastructure. Several years ago, Hightail made a strategic decision to shift from providing file storage to delivering value-added creative-collaboration services.
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