Mithi’s journey to the Cloud
Collaboration software development and
innovation today is moving along at an intense pace. According to industry analysts, collaboration software market
size will grow at 13% CAGR from 2016 to 2024 and exceed USD 8.5 billion by
2024. Another recent research by G2 Crowd illustrates that the boom in
corporate adoption shows no sign of slowing down in the near future. It found
that more than half of all the surveyed companies have already implemented team
collaboration solutions of one kind or another, and 31 percent plan to adopt
one in the next two years. The major forces driving this trend include
widespread usage of social networking websites, increased usage of mobile
devices, and the growing need for improved enterprise efficiencies.
Mithi Software Technologies distinguishes
itself as a provider of Email, Team Communication and Archiving solutions.
Mithi SkyConnect, an integrated collaboration suite, is designed to provide
Secure, Reliable and Real time collaboration for enterprises over multiple
communication channels and is serving business users globally. The company
started by building collaboration solutions on an Open Source Platform around
2005, with the objective of creating an affordable collaboration platform. It
saw that as a way to democratise the benefits of collaboration software.
Although the Open Source Platform is
affordable, the task of setting up and managing an email infrastructure on it
is complicated. With the growth in the number of customers and installations,
much of the teams’ time and resources were taken up in maintaining and managing
these set-ups. Worse still, it was hard to deliver a high quality experience
uniformly across all customers. The experience of the customers changed with
variations in the resources available at the customer site. Likewise, the limitations
of traditional Data Centers were compromising the hosted mail service
offerings.
About two years ago Mithi made the choice
of moving to the Cloud platform to overcome these limitations. When moving to
the Cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS) was a clear choice. In the 2016 Magic
Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service, Worldwide, for the 6th straight
year, Gartner placed AWS in the “Leaders” quadrant and named AWS as having both
the furthest completeness of vision and the highest ability to execute. Trusted
by over one million customers globally, AWS has 16 regions and 42 availability
zones. In addition, AWS has built a world class, highly secure infrastructure,
both physically and over the internet.
Moving to AWS
Mithi considered two major objectives
before making the big move to AWS. First, the cost of Bare Metal Infrastructure
at a data centre was less than similar resources on Cloud, due to the highly
redundant architecture used to deliver high availability and reliability. Added
to this, was the high manpower cost of migrating to this platform. Therefore,
it was necessary to find a way to keep the costs down and avoid a sharp price
escalation to the customers. Secondly, live services to the customers with all
their data had to be migrated (email, calendar, chat history, rosters, address
books etc.) with minimal disruptions to the service.
In order to do this, careful planning was
carried out. The first round of migration was done in the month of May, 2016
and involved a simple lift and shift operation for a small set of users. Over
the next 6 months, the rest of the domains and users were migrated in a phased
manner. The migration for all users was completed by the last week of November,
2016.
Migration involved the support,
infrastructure/operations and the development teams. While the support team was
responsible for coordinating with the customers, helping resolve any
migration-related issues and answering queries, the operations team worked on
the data migration. Starting with manual migration for the first batch, the
team ensured that all the learning was captured in designing an automated
migration process to ensure minimum downtime.
All this, while the engineering team
optimized the computing and storage requirements ensuring that the costs were
contained without compromising the availability and performance of the
solutions. And though the tasks related to migration for the ops and support
team is over as of now, the dev team continues to work on optimizing the
resource usage to deliver better performance and availability for the service.
Delivering uniform, dependable
experience
As noted before, the physical business
model was part of the reason for slow deployment, uneven outcomes,
accessibility challenges and lack of cost flexibility. AWS offered Mithi a
platform to mitigate these limitations, helping it deliver more convenience,
better performance, cost customization, on top of better security and
reliability that Mithi has built into its software.
Mithi has been serving the needs of some
of India’s leading enterprises for long, delivering high outcomes under very
demanding performance standards. All that learning is now available on the
cloud to companies of every size, especially benefitting startups and SMBs that
want to make the best use of their resources and are conscious of both cost and
productivity. The greater flexibility, reduced capital costs, improved
security, dependability and faster upgrades, that AWS offers is a welcome
change.
Moving towards a promising future
Moving to AWS has enabled Mithi to
innovate faster, bringing newer and better offerings to its customers. The
company recently launched two new services on AWS: Vaultastic – a cloud based
email archiving and backup solution that can be used to archive mails from any
mailing system; and ClearStream – offering AntiSpam, AntiVirus and RansomWare
protection for mail servers as well as a basic disaster recovery to ensure
email service continuity in case the primary email server is down or inaccessible.
