For more than 50 years, a certain global manufacturer has been a market leader in locks and locking systems for security, safety, and control. Their locks protect military, educational, banking and consumer locations; and their solutions support the security efforts of original equipment manufacturers, institutional, commercial, industrial, and residential end-users.

The Challenge

As a company known for its commitment to security, their reputation in protecting the public is critical. So when the company needed to roll out a new digital product offering to retailers across the country, they needed to create a cloud infrastructure that was secure, scalable, and accessible to hundreds of users, on their schedule, 24/7. The new product – a secure-access software platform – was designed to allow retailers to program electronic cylinder keys for users, who had an expectation that the digitally-enhanced keys would improve, and never compromise, the security of the locations that were protected by these locks. “Literally, every time a key is inserted in a lock cylinder, it records a date and time stamp for when that happens,” said Lance Schoell, Product Development Manager. “That information is sent to a database, which ultimately needed to store and protect millions, if not billions, of records.”

The Solution

Blue Sentry was selected for a twofold engagement – to migrate their workloads to the secure AWS Cloud, and to architect a software platform to support the new digital product, at a high level of performance, in a very compressed timeframe. To handle this most efficiently, Blue Sentry deployed an Agile Digital Transformation Team, which was embedded with their IT staff in a close working relationship. “Overall, the integration between our company and Blue Sentry was so transparent, said Schoell. “It was like they were here.
We were all following the same process of agile development, so it moved forward and progressed nicely.” Blue Sentry migrated their workloads to the cloud in a matter of weeks, and then set about supporting the new digital product for ongoing compliance with their security standards. Because these workloads had never operated in the cloud, their team was eager to understand performance at scale. Blue Sentry’s team applied simulated load to the environment with automated testing tools to fine tune the scaling characteristics of the workload on AWS services. The embedded team also tuned and optimized the databases for each workload on AWS RDS and other services to enhance performance.

The Benefit

For this global manufacturer, the AWS infrastructure allowed the company to support the 4,000 retail users of the new digital product, but, more importantly, situated Medeco to be able to seek out additional deployments of this type. “We have a lot of confidence in the work that Blue Sentry has done,” Schoell said. “We can leverage a lot that we’ve learned for future opportunities for customers with similar sized deployments.”