
Client Scenario
Our client is one of the world’s leading music company which owns and operates several businesses such as recorded music, music publishing, merchandising and audiovisual content.
The Central Catalogue Application is one of the key applications in our client side. The purpose of the application is to act as a media repository for client’s Business Users. The application combines data from multiple client source systems that include Metadata information, Release schedule for products and so on.
One of the primary media is asset ‘Cover Art’. Business users from across territories use the application to download ‘Cover Art’ and print it for label and promotion purposes.
The environment for the Central Catalogue Application was residing On-Premise within the client datacenter. In order to be able to optimize on hardware and licensing costs as well take advantage of the agility and cost benefits of cloud platform, our client decided to modernize their application by migrating the environment to AWS.
Challenges
- The physical hardware on which the application was hosted was due for a refresh. This means additional Capex to procure new servers, thereby increased costs
- System upgrades to the physical servers required downtime and impacted availability of the application
- Multiple applications were hosted on the same hardware, hence impacted performance during peak usage
- Scalability of the application was limited by the hardware configuration
- Storage space limitations due to increasing number of images stored on physical servers
- Poor user experience with deteriorating hardware performance
Solution Highlights
- The MS SQL database on prem was migrated to Windows Servers running on Amazon EC2
- DB size of 1.5 TB migrated
- Migrated SSIS packages
- Upgraded application to support .Net framework 4.5
- Implemented TLS 1.2 security
- Application code was moved to Github
- Verismic is used as the Cloud Management Suite
- AWS CloudTrail is enabled as a default
- CloudTrail logs are stored on Amazon S3
- Amazon CloudWatch metrics are enabled to check the health of each component
- PRTG (third party tool) is used for monitoring the health of the environment
- Syxsense tool is used for end point security
- Nessus is used for vulnerability & security scan
- IAM best practices and principles are followed
- Least privileged access is provided
- Unique non-root credentials are provided
- Programmatic access for API calls
- Security groups are defined to restrict traffic
- All Data stores are in private subnet
Solution Architecture

- Upgrading the application framework to the latest increased the performance of the application significantly. It also enabled the application for new enhancements
- Increased Scalability and Agility that is built into the solution. The limitations that existed with on-prem hardware were eliminated
- Upgrading the Transaction Layer Security (TLS) to newer version increased the security posture of the solution significantly