About The LOTE Agency
The LOTE Agency is a multicultural marketing agency that serves advertising needs for multicultural companies in helping them to deliver their message, product or brand to multicultural audiences. The LOTE Agency not only uses the best professional level translators available to translate the message and produce multilingual campaign materials, but also helps in effectively targeting a greater audience.
“While providing a range of advertising and marketing services like advertisements, brochures, corporate videos, research, planning and strategy to digital marketing production and delivery, The LOTE Agency serves the non-English Australian community including employers, advertising agencies and marketing professionals wishing to communicate with audiences from diverse cultural backgrounds.”
Drivers to the Cloud
The biggest influence for LOTE to move to a cloud-based platform was that their on-premises hardware was nearing end of life. An unexpected hardware failure nudged them towards a new solution slightly earlier than anticipated. “It was clear that we needed something more reliable than an on-site server”, spoke Peta Reynolds – Project Manager of The LOTE Agency about the disappointing experience caused by the server failure. The team have started realizing the significant limitations and challenges in cost, performance, and agility caused by the on-premise hosted server by the time this incident occurred.
The anticipation of the needs of its growing customer base was also one of the reasons that drove the company to move to the cloud.
Among many of the other drivers to the cloud, the security of data was a major concern with the rise of malicious attacks and crypto-style events. Having the data securely in an encrypted and secure cloud system removed the burden of further securing the physical office environment. The LOTE Agency now has all data encrypted at rest, all backups are encrypted and kept safe for as long as they require.
Why Amazon Web Services (AWS)
LOTE has been considering moving to AWS even before the server failure took place as they have been realizing the challenges and potential pitfalls that are inherent with on-premise servers. Without a remote solution and all the software running on that sever required staff to be located in the same physical location. AWS provides the ability to migrate from a normal workstation to a graphics workstation in a matter of minutes. This has been of benefit to LOTE as their needs change.
One of the other primary concerns for LOTE when contemplating the move to the cloud was the security. Data security being one of the main pillars of the Well Architected Framework, it is guaranteed that the data is stored more securely in their AWS tenant than in an on-premises server.
With AWS, the company exploits a scalable, reliable, and secure worldwide computing infrastructure, the virtual backbone of Amazon.com’s multi-billion-dollar online business that has been sharpened for over a decade. On the other hand, they can also scale up or down the computing resources according to business demand and requirements. Deploying new Workspaces or servers as well as the reduction of superfluous resources are instantly attainable.
The Benefits of Working with AWS and WOLK Technology – an AWS Advanced consulting partner and “Amazon EC2 for Microsoft Windows” Solution Provider
Moving to AWS has given LOTE the ability to go global, as it doesn’t require a specific location for staff members, In fact, they can work from anywhere in the world by logging into their own Workspaces environment. This has given the benefits and the capability to work globally despite the difficulties with doing so. Ash, Client Services Manager at The LOTE Agency, especially finds it convenient and easy as he can access the platform from anywhere with lower latency than before and also enjoys a better user experience. Moving to Workspaces has reduced the expenses on hardware – the company could cut down the expenditure on installation, configuration, and maintenance of high end graphics workstations and the on-premise servers including power costs, physical security concerns and cooling.
Looking Forward
The LOTE Agency keeps on propelling themselves to new heights while working closely with WOLK Technology, the organization intends to incorporate more AWS services into the platform.
The LOTE Agency now also has the ability to properly budget for tenders that they choose to bid for, having a fixed cost per employee or contractor, safe in the knowledge that the customer data never leaves the LOTE environment and when the tender ends, they no longer pay for those resources. A whole new way of working has opened up to LOTE, with the ability to engage staff or contractors from anywhere and at a moment’s notice. Applying for tenders that have extraneous security requirements is now also a lot easier – when completing the tenders they can now tick every box when it comes to security – “where is the data”, “how is the data stored, is it encrypted” or “who has access to the data” etc. Moving to AWS has given LOTE a solid security posture which really works in their favour when it comes to those security conscious customers.
So what did WOLK do for LOTE?
Due to hardware failure, WOLK lent LOTE some hardware thus time was a big factor in this migration so we fast-tracked the project and got all LOTE’s data synchronized and had the users working on AWS within a week. This was a pretty standard migration project for WOLK and fits our normal mold for Modern End User Compute.
WOLK conducted a Well Architected Review with LOTE. LOTE learned a lot about AWS and terms like RTO and RPO which was a fun process which added value to their business.
Moving to AWS and Workspaces has allowed LOTE predictable ongoing costs and an easy process for adding extra staff. Since moving to Workspaces LOTE has grown from an initial 4 users to over 25 users and still growing. These users are no longer restricted to a geographic location which means that there are far reaching implications for LOTE being able to employ people in the locations they physically need to work..
Technologies used within this environment include but are not limited to:
– Organizations– Cloudformation
– EC2
– Config
– GuardDuty
– KMS
– Secrets Manager
– Systems Manager
– Workspaces
– Lambda
– S3
– SES
– SNS
– Cloudtrail
– Cloudwatch
– Backup