TotalTrax, Inc. is a leading provider of real-time vehicle, driver, and inventory tracking technologies for manufacturing and warehouse operations. Combining patented hardware, software, reporting, along with business intelligence tools, TotalTrax transforms traditional fork trucks into “Smart Trucks” that track vehicle usage, maintenance, load, and location by leveraging the IoT. Eager to scale their business, TotalTrax couldn’t get the support they needed from their current AWS partner. TotalTrax’s Account Manager at AWS recommended a Well-Architected Review (WAR) from another AWS Premier Consulting Partner, Innovative Solutions, that he was confident was a good fit.
A Well-Architected Review is an architectural assessment based upon the AWS Well-Architected Framework to assist in creating a more secure, high-performing, resilient and efficient infrastructure.
“Innovative Solutions is an AWS Premier Consulting Partner, and I would highly recommend them to my customers and colleagues.” – Ryan Quigley, Account Manager at AWS
Once the WAR had been conducted, it became readily apparent that there were serious deficiencies in how their infrastructure was set up. For one thing, security was discovered to be seriously lacking. The Innovative team recommended a complete outline and plan to avoid major security breaches. That plan included automatic updates with Systems Manager, leveraging IAM Access Manager, and implementing a variety of the AWS Managed security offerings that would handle authorization, authentication, protected stores, visibility, and enforcement of TotalTrax AWS environment. Security was not the only area that was examined. Innovative took a good hard look at how best to optimize their cloud costs, suggesting utilizing a Cloud Management Platform (CMP) that would provide more than 550 best practice checks, cash flow protection, and compliance framework checks.
“Going through the project we identified some very large gaps in cost optimization, security, and just overall architecture of the environment.” – Jonathan Prutzman, Account Executive at Innovative Solutions
The Partner Solution
Once the management team at TotalTrax were presented with the WAR findings and recommendations, they came to the conclusion that they just were not satisfied with their current partner. Having Innovative Solutions handle the complete remediation seemed like a logical next step.
As the work Innovative was doing quickly progressed, the differences in style and responsiveness between the former partner and Innovative became obvious to the TotalTrax team. First off, Innovative was quick to answer questions or render support, totally the opposite of their former partner. Often enough they would be agonizingly slow to respond to support requests and questions, making the TotalTrax team feel that they were trapped in a long-term contract with a partner that didn’t care. Aside from that, they insisted on controlling much of the environment that they had built, limiting what TotalTrax could do within their own AWS environment. Finally, it became too frictional for the relationship to continue.
“With our previous provider, every three months or so we would have a totally different team that would support us. We didn’t know them, and they certainly didn’t know us.” – Thelma Marshall, VP of Operations at TotalTrax
It didn’t take long for TotalTrax’s leadership to conclude that Innovative Solutions was a good fit. Innovative offered a wide range of services under their Managed Cloud Services (MCS) offering that would enable TotalTrax to go in the direction they wanted as a business. They were responsive to their immediate needs and, with a deep bench of AWS experts, could help them achieve future business goals. Regardless of the initial cost of waiting out the long-term contract they were locked into, TotalTrax decided to give Innovative the go-ahead to create a totally new AWS environment. Innovative moved to put a dedicated team in place connecting all the players at TotalTrax on Slack, so communication became very clear and easy for everyone involved.
“TotalTrax has clear open channels of communications with all of us at Innovative. An example of this is, TotalTrax was running into Amazon EKS issues, and we were able to pull in 3 or 4 resources on the fly, and got it resolved that same day. They didn’t have to fill out a support ticket and wait for us to respond, they were able to reach out directly to me and we took over from there. Being this open makes us feel like part of their team, and not just a vendor.” – Eli Hills, Account Manager at Innovative Solutions
Hitting virtually every deadline they committed to, Innovative Solutions was then tasked with migrating all their remaining on-premises workloads to their new AWS environment, including their ERP system.
The Results and Benefits
TotalTrax now has a modern AWS environment that addresses security and utilizes a cloud management platform to manage costs efficiently. Savings are projected to be an eyebrow raising 75% of previous costs. Through Innovative’s MCS, TotalTrax has scalability, performance and reliability and a dedicated support team of AWS experts.
The benefits to TotalTrax of working with Innovative Solutions:
- Gaining total control over their AWS environment
- Achieving a much higher level of support, with no long-term contracts
- A dedicated team that truly cares about their business
- Continuous training and consulting to maintain best practices
- Proactive cost optimization tactics, including purchasing reserve instances (pre-buying AWS services in bulk representing a 30% savings)
Why Do It Alone
If you’re thinking about building your company’s future in the AWS cloud, let us help you build, manage and optimize your cloud infrastructure. Contact us today to begin a Well-Architected Review (www.innovativewar.com) or to talk about our Managed Cloud Services (www.innovativesol.com/mcs). We use a combination of the right people and automation to proactively manage your cloud environment, so you don’t have to.