Coherent moves to a cloud-based infrastructure, advises clients on how to do the same
If I were to describe 2014 at Coherent Solutions in one word, it would be: the cloud. Okay, that’s two words. But it would only be one word in Russian – cloud. Russian isn’t as fussy about including articles with nouns as English is.
Back to ‘the’ cloud. We spent a lot of time in 2014 working with our clients to run their workloads in the cloud. We’ve also advised them on the advantages of cloud-based platform services, as well as on the flexibility, transparency, and maintainability the cloud has to offer. Taking our own advice, we also moved many of Coherent’s operations to the cloud. If you look at where our infrastructure was in 2013, and then fast forward to the end of 2014, you see the dramatic difference a year has made in Coherent Solutions’ infrastructure and processes. (See below.)
| 2013 | 2014 |
|---|---|
| Ran our own Exchange servers to manage communications. | Use a virtual private cloud in AWS to extend Coherent’s corporate network environment. |
| Stored documents and records in an on premise SharePoint farm. | SharePoint and email document and records management run on Office 365. |
| Ran our web and FTP servers on our own hardware. | Identity federation supporting IT infrastructure is in the AWS cloud. |
| Used on premise TFS for project management, source control, reporting, and continuous integration of development projects. | Many more of our project teams enjoy the agility of having their development/test environments in the cloud. |
| Entered and tracked time on our own servers. | Project management, source code control, continuous integration all run on the Atlassian cloud. |
| Stored project-related development/test environments in server rooms. | Coherent clients are able to securely access new development, test or product releases via an easy-to-use customer portal. |
| All software systems, both internal and for client projects, were running on our own hardware. |
Our highly centralized infrastructure in 2013 required a lot of care and feeding on a daily basis, as well as periodic planning and troubleshooting. As you can see from the chart above, we began relying on a distributed cloud-based architecture in 2014, reducing the risk of a single point of failure for many of our business processes, while increasing flexibility.
Our focus in 2015 will be to help our clients leverage the cloud in their IT and custom software solutions. Feel free to contact us if you want to learn more about how the cloud can reduce your risk and cost, while giving you more flexibility to monitor, access and run your software products. There’s plenty of capacity at AWS, Azure, Google or Rackspace!