Enhancing Business Continuity with TrueMark AWS Solutions: A Case Study on Close To My Heart

About the Customer

Close To My Heart is a leader in the crafting industry, known for providing creative tools, supplies, and stamps to a large community of crafters. As they expanded, the need for a more reliable and scalable infrastructure became evident, with their existing on-premises solution unable to meet the increasing demands.

Customer Challenge

Close To My Heart’s on-premises infrastructure posed critical challenges that hindered its ability to scale and operate efficiently:

• Inadequate Reliability and Scalability: The legacy setup struggled to handle increased traffic and data loads, impacting the customer experience and operational stability.
• Risk of Business Disruptions: On-premises infrastructure carried significant risks of downtime, threatening continuous operations and customer trust.
• Cost Management: Rising operational expenses created an urgent need for a more cost-efficient solution while maintaining the flexibility to support future growth.

These challenges underscored the need for a scalable, secure, and reliable cloud-based infrastructure to support Close To My Heart’s operations and growth.

Partner Solution

TrueMark, an AWS Advanced Tier Partner, developed and implemented a comprehensive solution to address Close To My Heart’s challenges. By migrating their infrastructure to AWS, TrueMark ensured enhanced reliability, scalability, and cost-efficiency.

Key AWS Services Utilized

• Amazon EC2: Provided scalable compute capacity to host applications, dynamically adjusting to changing traffic demands.
• AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB): Improved fault tolerance and application performance by distributing traffic across multiple EC2 instances.
• Amazon RDS: Delivered managed database services with automated backups, patching, and recovery for high performance and reliability.
• Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS): Enabled low-latency, high-performance storage for critical applications.
• Amazon Elastic File System (EFS): Provided elastic file storage for shared workloads across multiple applications.
• AWS Migration Service : Simplified and accelerated the migration process with automation, minimizing downtime.
• AWS Availability Zones: Ensured fault tolerance and high availability by distributing resources across multiple data centers.
• AWS Cost Management Tools: Enabled detailed insights into resource usage, supporting proactive cost optimization.

Implementation Process

1. Migration Strategy and Planning: Conducted an in-depth assessment of the existing infrastructure, outlining a detailed roadmap for the migration process.
2. Seamless Migration: Utilized AWS MGN to automate the migration of workloads, ensuring minimal disruption and near-zero downtime.
3. Network and Security Enhancements: Built a robust AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) architecture with strategic connectivity solutions and implemented advanced security measures, including service control policies and single sign-on (SSO).

Results and Benefits

The migration to AWS transformed Close To My Heart’s infrastructure, resolving key challenges and providing a platform for long-term growth:

• Enhanced Business Continuity: AWS’s high-availability architecture ensured continuous operations, even during peak demand periods.
• Improved Scalability: The modern infrastructure dynamically scaled to meet customer demands without performance bottlenecks.
• Cost Optimization: Detailed insights into cloud usage and proactive cost management enabled a significant reduction in operational expenses.
• Increased Operational Efficiency: Automation of key processes allowed the company to focus resources on core business initiatives rather than IT management.

Key Metrics

• Downtime: Reduced to near-zero during and after the migration.
• Cost Savings: Achieved a 20% reduction in IT operational expenses.
• Performance: Improved system responsiveness, delivering a seamless customer experience.

About TrueMark

TrueMark, an IT Solutions provider and AWS Advanced Tier Partner, excels in guiding companies through the intricacies of migrating, modernizing, managing and supporting their IT Systems within AWS. We deliver key benefits to our customers, including improvements in efficiency, consistency, reducing cost, scaling systems, and security. Our competitive advantage stems from our ability to attract and maintain a team of dedicated and exceptionally skilled professionals, providing them with the resources they need to successfully tackle challenging projects and create sustainable, reusable patterns, tools and automation. At TrueMark, our commitment is to consistently deliver substantial value to our customers and to always act in their best interest, ensuring that our solutions not only meet but surpass expectations.