Reduced Response Times for Support

Ticketing Solution by 50% Using AWS

 needed a highly scalable and available IT infrastructure to support its mission critical applications

 The company is running its support ticketing solution on AWS

 Reduced response times for its support ticketing solution by 50%

 Maintained high service quality by scaling infrastructure to cope with a rise in requests

 Improved employee satisfaction and productivity

The Challenge
The Corporate IT team at Company 1 is responsible for the applications and infrastructure used by
Company 1 employees globally. Over the last few years, Company 1’s IT leadership has focused on
themes of simplification, automation, and digitization to deliver great end-user experiences, enhance
productivity, and to make IT more agile and cost-effective. Company 1 was an early adopter of cloud
technologies and had experienced the benefits of scalability, speed of application deployment, and
elimination of hardware refreshes. It had also seen a reduction in operational cost from moving to
the cloud.

One of Company 1 applications is Helpline, a mission critical application which processes around
200,000 helpdesk tickets from employees each month. These tickets, which are routed to
departments such as IT support, human resources, and facilities management, cover a wide variety
of requests. Helpline also integrates with multiple corporate applications and IT systems. Company 1
found the on-premise infrastructure supporting the Helpline application couldn’t deliver the
performance, scalability, and availability it required.

Why Amazon Web Services

After an evaluation of multiple cloud providers, Company 1 chose Amazon Web Services (AWS)
because of the maturity and robustness of the AWS platform. The advantages of the AWS platform
included its mature hybrid integration capabilities, advanced network, and security features. In
addition, AWS offered a strong track record in operational excellence and service innovation.

To quickly realize the benefits of the cloud, Company 1 aimed to complete the entire migration to
AWS within 60 days. The project team, led by Ankur Jalpota, practice head, strategy and
transformation at Company 1 Limited, and in close coordination with AWS architects, drew up a
detailed project plan covering the architecture, its connectivity, a migration plan, and user
acceptance testing. The target AWS architecture was designed to deliver high availability for each
component of the three-tier application. This includes a SQL server always-on (AON) configuration
for the database and servers distributed across two availability zones, enhanced performance using
solid-state drive (SSD) storage volumes, and secure access to each web addresses using secure
sockets layer (SSL) encryption. It also includes restricting access to instances using a combination
of security groups and network access control lists (ACL), and leverage SSL off-loading, reverse
proxy, caching, and sticky sessions on the load balancer.

A key part of the migration plan involved ensuring that the 12 integrations between the Helpline
application on AWS and other on-premise systems in the Company 1 datacenter were documented
and thoroughly tested. These included a cloud-operations-center solution, an IT asset management
system, an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, an authentication system, and an
Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system. Company 1 also chose to introduce machine learning
capabilities to resolve tickets faster by integrating Helpline with the Company 1 HOLMES Artificial
Intelligence Platform™.

“We were able to meet our migration deadline thanks to the great coordination between the
Company 1 and AWS teams. We had contingency and roll-back plans in place at the time of cutover
but didn’t have to invoke any of them. This was definitely one of the smoothest cloud migrations we
have experienced to date,” says Ramakanta Chowdhury, program manager, strategy and
transformation at Company 1 Limited.

Today, when employees want to raise a ticket, they login to the Helpline application, which is now
running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, launched inside Amazon
Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) environments. To manage the variable loads the application
frequently experiences, Elastic Load Balancing and Auto Scaling distribute incoming traffic and scale
the number of Amazon EC2 instances. Data backups and snapshots are durably stored in Amazon
Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). AWS CloudTrail records all API calls, which enables security
analysis and compliance auditing by Company 1 staff.

The figure below illustrates Company 1’s environment in AWS:

The Benefits
Moving to AWS has ensured easy access to the Helpdesk application anytime and from anywhere. “We
have reduced response times for our support ticketing solution by 50 percent using AWS, enhancing
employee satisfaction and productivity,” says Raja Ukil, chief information officer and senior vice president
at Company 1 Limited. The performance of the AWS environment and the addition of machine learning
have reduced the time it takes to close tickets. “After going live, we started monitoring the utilization of our
resources and fine-tuned the infrastructure sizing,” says Ankur Jalpota. “This resulted in an additional 20
percent reduction in our initially provisioned infrastructure versus what we forecasted. This was simply not
possible in our on-premise environment.”

“The Helpline migration to the AWS Cloud has been a great opportunity to partner with AWS to deliver
improved business and IT alignment.” says Ankur Jalpota. “We intend to build on this strategic
partnership by leveraging AWS capabilities in the areas of artificial intelligence, mobility, and analytics.”

Company 1 and AWS also share a strong global partnership which continues to expand rapidly, and its
joint customers are benefitting from the shared value of putting custome\rs first and a strong focus on
innovation at the intersection of business and technology.

Varun Dube, general manager – AWS practice at Company 1 Limited says, “Innovation is in our
organization’s DNA. This success story is a great testimony to how Company 1 is leveraging AWS for
innovating and reimagining its internal business platforms and processes in the digital era. We have been
a premier consulting partner of AWS for five years, and we aim to be an innovation-led cloud partner in
our customers’ digital transformation journey with a strong foundation on AWS. We have a strong 360-
degree partnership with AWS, and our “customer first” approach is key in creating three-way-wins for
clients, Company 1, and AWS.”