Securus Technologies connects family and friends to the incarcerated with their messaging, voice calls, and other communication services. They serve over 3,400 public safety, law enforcement, and corrections agencies and over 1.2 million incarcerated individuals across North America.
The Challenges
With Securus' continual growth, their legacy system was breaking. They used VMware’s on-premises cloud solution. Securus had issues with their system becoming unstable whenever there was a peak of activity.
To release new improvements it would take months to go to production. This delay was due to manual workflows, and a lack of set processes. To solve this issue the company needed to create fixed workflows and provide documentation teams could refer to and follow.
Securus began to work with StratusGrid to move their data centers to the cloud, rather than renewing their on-premises solutions. They aimed to modernize their product architecture and implement CloudNative solutions.
As an AWS Premier Tier Partner with AWS migration competencies and over a decade of experience, StratusGrid was the ideal partner for Securus.
The Solution
StratusGrid hit the ground running by doing a full assessment of all of Securus technologies and libraries. The partners decided to enroll in the Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) and requested funding from AWS.
With MAP, companies are eligible for up to $460k in funding. Within two months, StratusGrid had ensured the first round of funding for Securus’ migration.
After a full analysis, StratusGrid started by migrating Securus’ media catalog services to the cloud. All media catalog service workloads that were running on bare metal servers or VMWare VMs were containerized and migrated to AWS ECS on Fargate. The media catalog PostgreSQL database was migrated to AWS Aurora utilizing the latest Aurora Serverless v2 instances. To reduce the number of manual processes and settings, all infrastructure provisioned in AWS was codified in Terraform, and CI/CD pipelines were created to handle all infrastructure provisioning and configuration.
The Results
The project lasted 8 months, at the end of which Securus was successfully CloudNative. StratusGrid provided Securus with interdisciplinary team training. The teams included product, customer service, and engineering. StratusGrid also created full documentation around their new AWS environment, processes, and workflows for the development, support, and engineering teams to follow.
Soon after the migration was finished a new facility was onboarded to Securus and for the first time in years nothing in the system crashed.
Another result of the cloud migration was that no new processes could be added without permission. That means that everything is streamlined and consistent, and new deployments are fully automated. This new setup meant that releases went from being around 3 months to improvements going out once a month on average.
Now that infrastructure was automated, engineers no longer had to manage due to homemade, handspun systems manually. Securus’ engineers gained 10 hours each week.
StratusGrid: Your Migration Partner
StratusGrid aims to make migration as stress-free and smooth as possible. To help our clients do their entire migration, from recycling hardware to having an efficient AWS environment, we created a unique migration offering with our partners.
Learn more in the video below:
