Georgia Technology Authority Successfully Moves Critical App to AWS Cloud

Georgia Technology Authority (GTA) provides technology leadership to the State of Georgia for sound IT enterprise management, ensuring state agencies and entities are tech-enabled.  Their services to state and local governments, commercial entities, and the public include reliable, secure and innovative IT infrastructure and managed network services (GETS), GTA Direct vendor procurement services, and a record database with information including birth certificates, death certificates, motor vehicle licensing and criminal records.

As part of the State of Georgia Governor’s directive to migrate state workloads from on-premise datacenters to the Cloud, GTA selected their GTA Portal application as an initial candidate with the goal of reducing operational costs, minimizing infrastructure management and upkeep, reducing infrastructure
and licensing costs by taking advantage of cloud-native services, and improving resiliency and stability.  As part of the migration, GTA also sought opportunities to improve their development process, take advantage of managed database services, and improve operations. They chose TekStream and AWS after
a rigorous platform vetting process.

Download the Case Study

Technologies Involved

AWS

AMS Accelerate
AWS ACM
AWS CloudFront
AWS CodeDeploy
AWS CodePipeline
AWS EC2
AWS EFS
AWS Elastic Load Balancer
AWS MGN (Services)
for Windows application
server migrations
AWS RDS for Oracle
AWS RDS for SQL
AWS Route53
AWS S3
AWS WAF

AWS Migration Services Competency

Project Requirements

Reduce infrastructure costs while limiting dependency on third-party implementation oversight and management

Facilitate greater operationalization and security controls by taking advantage of AWS Managed Services

Replace legacy footprint including RedHat, Linux and IBM Websphere

Streamline code management and deployment practices

Infrastructure to follow AWS Best Practices

Solution Provided

TekStream worked with GTA to build out an automated CI/CD pipeline utilizing AWS native services CodeDeploy and CodePipeline. This allows GTA to automate the management, review and release of application code and changes across multi-account and multi-environment configurations for development, testing, UAT and production. This functionality permits them to ensure code validation is conducted in a structured and secure fashion
while greatly reducing development timelines.

GTA is now able to self-manage DNS using AWS Route53, which removes their reliance on legacy on-premise support services and eliminates long wait times to process requests. Atlassian, JIRA, and CodeCommit have been integrated to streamline their DevOps.

“By moving to AWS and adopting our new Pipeline strategies, an issue with a service or server doesn’t impact the entire stack. Previously, we’d have to take down nearly a third of our environment to fix, deploy, and text, but now we can isolate changes, approvals, testing, and deployments,” said Chuck Robinson, Director of Application Development and Maintenance for GTA.

Additionally, TekStream leveraged the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) on GTA’s behalf to secure funding that offset 30% of their implementation costs, valued at more than $150,000. AWS MAP incentives are available for eligible migration projects and are accessible
only via an AWS Migration Competency Partner.

Georgia Technology Authority realized

$1M annual savings by moving workloads to the AWS Cloud and leveraged $150K in AWS incentives to fund their migration

“TekStream worked with us to understand the complexity of the project and approach it as a team. Their unwavering commitment to our objectives and to working with us as a team was the key to the success of our project.”

– Chuck Robinson, Georgia Technology Authority

Key Successes

  • Leveraged AWS MAP incentives to offset more than $150K of implementation costs
  • Realized $1M annual savings by moving workloads, giving GTA a short 13-month return on investment
  • Reduced infrastructure costs 50% by moving workloads to AWS from on-premise data centers
  • Created a more highly available and resilient infrastructure for the workloads
  • Replaced RedHat servers in favor of Amazon Linux resulting in further cost savings
  • Replaced existing Webtier with AWS CloudFront/WAF with Elastic Load Balancing to provide more performant and secure access to the Portal applications
  • Migrated existing Oracle and Microsoft SQL servers to AWS Relational Database Service (RDS) for Oracle and AWS RDS for SQL-managed servers resulting in lower operational requirements and improved automation for management

Customer: Georgia Technology Authority

Industry: State Government Agency

Headquarters: Atlanta, GA

Annual Budget: $51,230,000

Georgia Technology Authority (GTA) provides technology leadership to the State of Georgia for sound IT enterprise management, ensuring state agencies and entities are tech-enabled.