Interact

The Mentana Town Council, cooperating closely with cloud architect solutions of Interact, has implemented an infrastructure in cloud Computing to meet the requirements involving performance, storage and controlled expenses offered by the aCloud solution offered by AWS.

REQUIREMENTS

To ensure that the services directed towards their citizens and facilitate the Town Council offices to continue operating, the Mentana Town Council Chief of the CED has requested a streamlined solution at an affordable expense for the budget of their Administration, to be used to migrate their own servers onto cloud.

To be more precise, during this first phase, the goal to be reached was to activate the instances for migration and management of the following:

• Web server for the town council site
• Town council main server
• Town council police server
• Backup and migration of data and service applications

The Town Council further expressly requested a technical, systematic support both from remote as well as on site, should the need arise for an intervention of our architect solutions for the purpose of supporting the technical area of the Town Council CED. This would enable a cooperative, contextual growth of the Town Council's internal resources, thus permitting them to become independent regarding the configuration and use of their services.

PRESENTING THE SERVICES

The technical and commercial staff of Interact have organised a meeting for discovering and presenting aCloud powered by AWS solutions destined to Town Councils for an in-depth knowledge involving the specific topics, together with the ICT and administrative heads.

• Presenting AWS service VPC (backup, storage gateway, EC2 with a linux server)
• VPC enabled (backup, storage gateway, EC2 with linux server)
• AWS cost analysis: advantages and disadvantages compared to the current management
• Means of purchase MEPA (prepaid)

IMPLEMENTATION

A Configuration and activation of the service

• During the programming and developing phase involving the best ICT architecture in cloud with the Amazon Web Services various financial solutions, both technological and financial, were considered including what had to comply with the regulations as far as the Digital ùAdministration were concerned as well as the Town Council requirements to be met regarding Storage and Disaster Recovery.

The activated aCloud services powered by AWS:

• EC2 t2 medium instances in 1 year reserved modality to make use of the ever ready instances but at a discounted price (2 vCPU, 4 Gb RAM);
• An EC2 t2 medium instance to manage the webmail service;
• EBS - Storage application complete with 6 General Purpose SSD volumes, active and connected to the instances being used;
• Route 53 to route end users towards internet applications or the Town Council Site.

B. Purchasing and entrusting the service

The Mentana Town Council was able to directly activate both services in cloud as well as support and training via the Consip System (the PA Electronic Market - MePa) by simply purchasing prepaid recharges from the aCloud system.

• The aCloud payment system offers purchasing various cuts of credit from the MePa to be used for all the AWS services comprising activating the account;
• Calculating the cuts for recharging purposes are based on the use estimated according to each single requirement of the Administration during the pre-analytic phase;
• aCloud does not bind any Public Administration to periods of minimum use but using services depends exclusively on the credit purchased based on the the amount of credit remaining.

CONCLUSIONS

The Mentana Town Council CED in charge is most satisfied both because of the performances offered as well as the Backup and DR services delivered so professionally by our personnel during the phases of analysis, configuration and support. The Town Council Administrations further succeeded via a very smooth procedure to meet with the following two requirements:

1. Implementing a DR service for citizens
2. Complying with the ruling regulations related to data safeguarding and privacy

Following this first phase, the Mentana Town Council, is now proceeding onto the following step aimed at migrating the entire infrastructure in local towards the Amazon Web Services cloud. The following goals comprise migrating their own LAMP Database onto the Amazon Aurora cloud (compatible with MySQL) as well as the whole Backup of the data.

Consult aCloud Powered by Amazon Web Services for further details