Posted By: TerraAlto – August 21st, 2023

Having recently completed their most significant digital transformation project in over a decade, Irish Times Digital have selected TerraAlto – a PFH Technology Group Company, as AWS managed service provider to deliver 24×7 management of their AWS-based digital experience platform. With TerraAlto ensuring that Irish Times’s AWS environment remains available, secure and well-maintained, Irish Times are now able to dedicate their IT team to the ongoing development and innovation of their industry-leading digital content platform for their growing subscriber base.

Why Irish Times Digital Choose TerraAlto

• Expertise: As an advanced consulting partner dedicated to AWS since 2013, with significant experience in working with global brands hosting business-critical applications on AWS, Irish Times were confident that TerraAlto had the AWS knowledge and expertise they required.
• Service-Fit: TerraAlto’s comprehensive suite of managed services included everything Irish Times were looking for in an AWS managed service partner: 24×7 AWS monitoring, incident response, ongoing maintenance and security management
• Value-Added Services: Beyond core AWS managed services, the TerraAlto team’s knowledge of other technology areas of relevance to Irish Times such as CICD pipelines, networking and databases means that TerraAlto are a partner with the capability to make a broader contribution to Irish Times over time.

About Irish Times Digital

The Irish Times, is one of Ireland’s most widely read newspapers, with a daily reach of 534,000 readers across print and online, have recently completed a major redesign of their digital content platform to significantly enhance their ability to create, manage and promote Irish Times articles, videos, podcasts, photography and graphics across all of its platforms.

The Irish Times AWS environment is comprised of AWS-based digital experience platform Arc-XP (www.arcxp.com), and a custom-built AWS serverless integration platform that seamlessly distributes Arc-XP mastered content across print and digital subscriber content channels.

The Customer Challenge

Since launching their new digital platform on the AWS, Irish Times had been maintaining their AWS environment from within their in-house technology team. However, given the newspaper’s core focus on content and digital experience innovation, Irish Times decided that strategically, they needed the support of a specialist AWS consulting and managed service partner for the following reasons:

• By outsourcing day-to-day management of their AWS environment to an AWS-certified managed service provider, Irish Times could free up technical resources to focus exclusively on digital experience application development and innovation.
• By engaging an experienced AWS consulting partner, Irish Times application developers would have access to the latest information and advice on how to unleash the full potential of AWS services.

TerraAlto Solution

TerraAlto provides Irish Times with a Managed Service solution that ensures the Irish Times AWS environment in which they host their digital content integration platform remains available, performant, secure, well-maintained and cost-optimised.

• Service Desk: The first point of contact for Irish Times AWS users who wish to raise incidents, access requests and change requests with the TerraAlto managed service team.
• Availability and Performance monitoring: Ensures that AWS availability and performance metrics are monitored on an ongoing basis and that any events and/or breaches of acceptable tolerances are responded to 24 x 7.
• Incident Response and Resolution: Irish Times’s AWS-related incidents and problems are identified and resolved in a timely manner. New incidents are identified through automated monitoring and alerting, as well as from directly reported incidents from Irish Times AWS users through the TerraAlto Service Desk. TerraAlto cloud engineers are available to respond to incidents 24×7 within pre-agreed SLAs.
• Instance Backup and Recovery: All Irish Times data residing on AWS is backed up regularly using the AWS Backups service and is available for restoration in line with Irish Times’s Recovery Point Objectives and Recovery Time Objectives.
• Capacity Management: Utilises real-time monitoring and threshold-based alerting using AWS CloudWatch and AWS Kinesis to manage the capacity of AWS instances and storage supporting Irish Times workloads.
• Security Access Management: Ensures that access to Irish Times’s AWS resources remains restricted to authorised individuals and groups using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) and AWS Identity Centre (which is fully integrated with Irish Times Active Directory).
• Cost Reporting: On-going monthly reporting of Irish Times’s AWS costs using cost allocation tags to identify and monitor cost trends over time.
• Cost Optimisation: On-going proactive monitoring of Irish Times’s AWS costs to identify and drive reductions in AWS costs.
• Change Management: All changes are reviewed, tested and approved in compliance with Irish Times’s change management policy.

Results and Benefits Delivered

• Speed of Engagement: Using TerraAlto’s onboarding methodology, TerraAlto successfully onboarded the Irish Times AWS environment to the TerraAlto AWS managed service in just 4 weeks.
• Cost Optimisation and Savings – Since taking over management of the Irish Times AWS environment, TerraAlto’s cost optimisation service has reduced monthly AWS run costs by over 30%
• Enabling Focus On Business Growth: With AWS environment maintenance outsourced to TerraAlto, Irish Times have been able to focus their IT teams on application innovation and business growth, safe in the knowledge that the availability and security of their AWS environment are being managed by an AWS-certified Managed Service Provider.
• Scalability: Considering the inherent scalability of the AWS platform, along with the flexibility with which TerraAlto can deploy operational capacity, Irish Times now have a platform and a partner capable of supporting their evolving business needs

About TerraAlto

TerraAlto is an AWS Advanced Consulting and MSP Partner with an AWS DevOps Competency, who help TerraAlto, a PFH Technology Group company, is an AWS Advanced Consulting and MSP Partner with an AWS DevOps Competency, who helps organisations build and manage advanced solutions utilising AWS services for big data, IoT and enterprise data platforms. With extensive experience in delivering greenfield implementations, migrations and application innovations, TerraAlto have worked with a wide range of client organisations ranging from tech start-ups to large global organizations.

As an approved member of the AWS Managed Service Provider Partner Program, TerraAlto provides 24-7 managed services for AWS environments in Europe and in Asia (including China). As an active participant in the AWS Well-Architected Framework Program, TerraAlto helps its clients to ensure secure and compliant usage of AWS services including the building of automated compliance frameworks for enterprise-wide exception alerting and reporting.