The Challenge

This company offers enterprise customer data platforms to businesses — previously was working with Blue Sentry on a long-term engagement to migrate resources from several colocated data centers and Azure. The existing network was a complex infrastructure with a hub-and-spoke topology. The goal was eventually to make a new AWS VPC — located in the us-east-2 the hub — as resources were migrated. In July 2020, their leadership learned that its colocated data hub would be limiting physical access for third-party engineers due to COVID-19 restrictions. This represented myriad challenges for them: Its Cisco switches at the hub were serving as the brains to their network architecture; even worse, the current engineers were unable to access those switches remotely. As a result of the COVID-imposed restrictions, they decided to expedite its move to the AWS-based hub.

The Solution

Blue Sentry engineers were tasked with handling this migration to a new cloud-native hub-and-spoke topology in rapid fashion, delivering a robust and flexible solution with no downtime. Blue Sentry engineers quickly developed a plan to use Transit Gateways in their own dedicated VPCs to achieve the desired flexibility. Blue Sentry used its repository of pre-configured Terraform modules to customize and spin up the desired infrastructure components immediately and was able to switch over the entire hub and spoke scheme to AWS in less than three days (including testing) without any customer downtime. Additionally, Blue Sentry used the Transit Gateway VPC as a central location for a global VPN solution that increased performance and eliminated licensing expenses for all of their remote engineers around the world.

The Benefit

Blue Sentry, founded on three core principles — Speed, Learning, and Ownership — was ideally suited to innovate quickly and efficiently to foster a successful outcome for them. Blue Sentry’s engineers designed a solution inside of a single day and completely implemented it within three working days, while also improving performance and reliability for their engineers around the world.

As David Kohler, Director of Information Technology at this fund management firm, stated:

“I want to personally thank you for the innovative ideas and working through the many challenges we had the last few days. None of us created this mess, but I am sure glad we had each of you working on our team to resolve the lack of a direct tunnel between our legacy data center and AWS. Yet another example of BSI being a true partner, thank you!”