Case study

Times of Malta Seamlessly Migrates to AWS Cloud with StormIT

CategoryCase Studies

In this case study, you will read about:

Times of Malta improves flexibility, High Availability and GDPR compliance by moving its core timesofmalta.com website’s infrastructure to AWS. Times of Malta worked with AWS Consulting Partner StormIT to build a scalable AWS environment based on Amazon EC2.

Malta's Number One News Website

Times of Malta has a history going back to the 1920s, when it pioneered journalism and the printing industry in Malta. Times of Malta is the country’s favorite and most trusted news organization. The website timesofmalta.com has around 180,000 average daily users, generating around 700,000 daily page views, beating traffic for giants Facebook and YouTube in Malta.

Times of Malta website preview

The most important reason of such success is that Times of Malta remains a credible, trusted news organization with an efficient breaking news service and that's essential in an era where fake news is clogging social media.

Limited by Fixed Systems and GDPR Requirements

Existing environment hosted at traditional hosting provider was preventing Times of Malta from the development and adoption of latest technology. In order to continue to provide it’s readers with reliable source of information Times of Malta needed to find a reliable IT infrastructure partner provider to gain the agility and flexibility to increase the pace of innovation. Additionally, to comply with the GDPR regulation after Brexit the Times of Malta was looking to move their computer system resources to EU-based data centers.

Migrating Times of Malta to Amazon Web Services(AWS)

Challenges of migration

To address its challenges, Times of Malta chose to migrate its core technology platform to Amazon Web Services, a cloud leader in Infrastructure & Platform Services. AWS’s Global Cloud Infrastructure is the most secure, extensive, and reliable cloud platform, offering over 200 fully-featured services from data centers globally. The AWS Cloud, with its on-demand capacity and consumption-based pricing, and incredible pace of innovation was an attractive option. Alex Galea (company’s COO) and his team compared various cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Working with StormIT

Times of Malta began working with AWS Partner Network (APN) Select Consulting Partner StormIT. The migration to AWS had been thoroughly planned and the architecture deployment had been designed according to the AWS best practices by StormIT. The AWS architecture now allows Times of Malta to deliver rich content on their website faster to their readers, scale quickly with increased demand and innovate and implement new technologies rapidly.

A Highly Available Solution

It is business-critical for Times of Malta that its application and database compute resources are always available to provide its readers with a reliable source of information. Considering this, the StormIT team designed a Highly Available architecture.

Using Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), the StormIT team built a secure and logically isolated section of Amazon Web Services Cloud.

Elastic Load Balancing automatically routes requests to the most appropriate Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance with computing resources spread over the 3 Availability Zones.

To be in line with Times of Malta’s business requirement and objectives for availability and durability, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) object storage service is used for storing the Digital Assets and provides 99.999999999% (11 9's) of durability.

To deliver rich content to readers across the world, Times of Malta uses Amazon CloudFront CDN. Massively scaled and globally distributed content delivery network (CDN) with 400+ points of presence (PoPs), that provides ultra-low latency, high availability and increased security.

Times of Malta uses AWS WAF to protect their website and application against all commonly known application-layer (layer 7) attacks and exploits.

Amazon Cloudfront and WAF architecture diagram

StormIT Services Related to Cloud Migration

StormIT is a certified APN Partner highly skilled in delivering custom cloud projects and build a solution that is unique to customer’s project requirements. StormIT offers control over the whole migration process and AWS consultancy for its every step:

  • Cloud Migration, Modernization, and Transformation: Readiness assessment, business outcomes identification, selection of an appropriate migration plan, evaluation of your specific migration needs.
  • Architecture design: Design and deployment of high availability architectures, thorough assessment and security planning, non-disruptive to your business.
  • Cloud Foundation: AWS Cloud Adoption Framework principles, tailor-made workshops, best practices guidance.
  • Cost Optimization and Enterprise Cloud Management Platform: 24/7 monitoring for under-utilized assets, senior AWS Solution Architect consultancy, Cloudcheckr platform access.

You can read more about our cloud migration process and related services here:

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