Optimizing Cloud Costs

A Joint Technical Webinar with AWS

case study

Top U.S. Car Manufacturer

Prosimo Solution For Leading automotive company improves Atlassian Confluence application experience by 80 percent while reducing deployment time to five minutes and cutting infrastructure costs in half with Prosimo AXI Solution.

COMPANY PROFILE

Leading Automotive Company

A leading automotive company in the U.S. understands that a global economy requires a global workforce. With offices in North America, Europe, Latin America, and India, the company has embraced an operating model based on business agility and collaboration across multiple stakeholders and teams within the organization.

The company’s collaborative culture is powered by Atlassian Confluence, a workplace productivity tool based in the cloud that allows distributed teams to work together on business-critical projects such as prototyping new services, secure payment processing frameworks for customers, internal cloud migration, and expansion blueprints. Every team member has visibility into institutional knowledge and access to the information they need to work harder and smarter—regardless of their physical location.

CHALLENGE

At the time, the organization was managing multiple VPN solutions in various locations to connect to a Confluence application hosted within the EU-Central region in AWS and using the Internet as their primary mid-mile to enable access for users located in the U.S., Central America, and India. Users could access Confluence from various locations over different connection types—home broadband, shared library environments, and wireless—using VPN. Users experienced a lot of disconnections and poor performance over VPN going through the vagaries of the Internet, and they found it challenging to complete tasks and collaborate effectively. The company found it difficult to maintain a sophisticated security posture that goes beyond simply applying IP ACLs with a username/password as the default access control method.

It was clear that this leading automotive company needed an enterprise-grade, scalable, and easy-to-deploy platform that could help streamline the application experience and provide deep visibility into user traffic. Operational consistency was paramount as they onboarded more clients and users when they expanded their business in other regions—all while moving to an extensive multi-cloud architecture.

SOLUTION

Wanting to take full advantage of the scale and economy of multi-cloud environments for its Atlassian Confluence application, the automotive company deployed Prosimo Application eXperience Infrastructure (AXI) with AWS cloud-native services to better deliver application performance to its distributed workforce.   During the pre-production pilot, Prosimo AXI was able to deliver an optimized path and high-performance application experience to users accessing Atlassian Confluence from the U.S., India, Central America, and France—without any VPN agent software on users’ devices.

Setting up new Atlassian Confluence users and locations is easy through an intuitive wizard that gives the operations team the control to set parameters such as protocol, private peering using AWS TGW, and performance profiles. Setting up transport infrastructure in a new user location or a virtual DMZ for a new cloud service provider used to take hours. Prosimo does it automatically in five minutes while cutting infrastructure costs (firewalls, load balancers, and proxies) in half.

A vast network of Prosimo AXI solution sensors deployed in public and private infrastructure around the world continually feed application experience data back to a central platform where it can be acted on. This also feeds into a dynamic risk score for each user that identifies potential threats and automatically reduces attack surfaces. Based on these insights, Prosimo Edges scale up and down automatically based on user load and throughput requirements.

Working together to create and maintain a common cloud infrastructure stack that sits across existing multi-cloud environments, Prosimo AXI allows the automotive company to maintain consistent performance, capabilities, and security policies for every user—regardless of location or underlying infrastructure.

BIG WINS

  1. Session-level insights that helped the cloud infra teams to quickly identify and fix the performance and security issues, without looking at 10 different consoles.

  2. Delivered improved performance for users accessing Confluence by more than 80 percent.

  3. Platform provided Application Experience Score for performance monitoring and helped teams to find specific root causes for low-scoring applications and fix any first-mile or mid-mile latency issues quickly.

  4. Provided deep insights with Dynamic User Risk scoring to quickly identify and elevate security posture for high-risk users accessing internal assets, which helped security teams to reduce the attack surface by 99 percent.

  5. Platform provided ML that supplied recommendations to the cloud infra teams for expanding or retracting by dynamically scaling the Prosimo AXI footprint to improve performance and reduce cost.

  6. Reduced deployment time to five to seven minutes, as opposed to the hours previously needed to set up transport infrastructure in various branch locations and virtual DMZ in every cloud service provider.

  7. Significantly cut down on the infrastructure costs of setting up DMZ (firewalls, load balancers, proxies) by 50 percent.

Applications & User Demographics 
Improving Atlassian Confluence Experience

  • Application Name: Atlassian Confluence

  • Application Hosting Location: France AWS EU-Central

  • Application Type: HTTPs

  • User Location: U.S. West, Central America, and India

  • AXI Optimization: Performance lanes, content caching, avoid lossy mid-mile using data patterns, context-aware secure access, layer 7 optimization

  • Peering/Connectivity Options: Private Peering using AWS TGW with Confluence

RESULTS

Prosimo AXI solution gives the leading automotive company the ability to maintain a collaborative culture across a highly-distributed, global workforce. Users can log on to Atlassian Confluence and enjoy the same improved application experience anywhere in the world, allowing them to work together and collaborate on mission-critical projects as a single team across continents and oceans. In fact, Prosimo AXI delivers an 80 percent improvement in Atlassian Confluence application performance across all users.

Prosimo AXI also makes life easier for cloud architects and the operations team by cutting down the time it takes to spin up new users and cloud service providers while decreasing infrastructure costs. It also improves the company’s security posture by reducing attack surfaces by 99 percent.

Prosimo AXI solution enables the company’s agile business model and cloud transformation without the complexity and common roadblocks that plague most enterprise cloud journeys. This cements the company’s standing as a leader in the competitive automotive industry where traditional manufacturers are getting squeezed by smaller, leaner disruptors. Multi-cloud can be a powerful business enabler for innovative, forward-thinking companies—but only if enterprises have visibility and control over application experience.