Application Migration: Service Employees International Union

When flooding took out SEIU‘s New York data center, the national nonprofit needed a plan for migrating to the AWS cloud

Through third-party and cloud-native tools, we provided the infrastructure, resources, and products necessary for an efficient application migration.

Challenge

The national nonprofit serves branches of the organization with centralized IT based out of its New York offices. When NYC was hit by Hurricane Sandy in 2012, it led to flooding of the organization’s data center, housed in the basement of the building. The resulting outage took a week to recover from. The nonprofit needed a cloud-based backup solution and rapid application migration to ensure that it could be prepared against future disasters.

Solution

We began with an assessment of the organization’s data center posture, then created a migration plan and proposed architecture to support the nonprofit moving forward in AWS. We configured VPCs, subnets, networking, and configured access policies. We also connected a third-party disaster recovery service to ensure consistent synching of information between on-premises and cloud servers.

The Benefits

Peace of Mind

After going without its critical IT infrastructure for a week, the nonprofit had confidence its cloud infrastructure would be highly available.

Data Replication

The AWS infrastructure included VPN connectivity to the on-premises network in order to replicate Active Directory and SQL databases to ensure ongoing operations.

VPN Tunneling

In addition to an initial VPN connection, our team configured remote VPN connectivity from field offices in seven east coast cities to ensure all users could access the environment in the event of a failure.