Charting Success in the Cloud: How Aplicom Overcame Security and Efficiency Challenges with AWS and Intcomex Cloud

Aplicom is a Costa Rican company that has been a commercial ally for over 24 years in the digital transformation processes of businesses. Their value proposition revolves around empowering organizations with technology, innovation, and knowledge, thereby reducing operational costs and increasing efficiency and productivity across all processes.

Aplicom’s core business is centered around document management solutions, with over 500 active clients and a monthly digitization of approximately 2.5 million documents.

The Challenge

Aplicom faced the challenge of moving their workloads from traditional scenarios to the cloud to improve availability, security, operational efficiency, and cost-effectiveness. Their primary service to clients is the Laserfiche content management solution, for which they are premier distributors. Various public and private entities in Costa Rica had experienced cyberattacks that compromised service availability. Aplicom needed to enhance the security and availability of their application. Failure to do so could impact both their internal services and those provided to clients, potentially affecting their reputation, reliability, and ultimately, their business.

Why AWS?

When evaluating options for a technological upgrade in their local data center or migrating workloads to the cloud with the assistance of Intcomex, several key advantages of AWS stood out in addressing Aplicom’s challenges:

• AWS service levels for their services far exceeded those of a local data center, like the one Aplicom had.
• An opportunity to update their Microsoft operating systems and services used by the application during migration.
• Leveraging services like Inspector to assess vulnerabilities in Aplicom’s operating systems and Systems Manager for management, including Patch Manager.
• Designing an architecture that fit within the budget while addressing Aplicom’s challenges with Intcomex’s support.
• Access to various AWS services and features that improved the security posture of Aplicom’s workloads, such as security groups, WAF, and Security Hub.
• Enhanced visibility into the usage and status of services in the proposed architecture through CloudWatch, enabling Aplicom to identify and optimize their workloads.

Why Aplicom Worked with Us?

Intcomex supported Aplicom in various phases of this project, including explaining and emphasizing the benefits of migrating workloads to AWS, architectural design, cost estimations, managing credits with AWS, service implementation, guidance during implementation to resolve queries, and cost optimization through the use of Saving Plans.

The Solution

To enhance security, various AWS services were used and parameterized. One of the main services was the managed AWS WAF, utilizing Core rules provided and managed directly by AWS, in addition to adding some custom rules.

Key services used:

• Microsoft SQL Server Database.
• Microsoft IIS Server.
• Microsoft Active Directory.
• Web Server with Apache.
• Web Server with WordPress.
• AWS WAF.
• Load Balancer.
• Certificate Manager.
• AWS Backup.
• Security Hub.
• Systems Manager.

Solution Diagram

Benefits

As a result of this project and after several months of having their main productive environments on AWS, Aplicom has committed to a 3-year purchasing contract using Saving Plans to optimize their costs. They also plan to implement other servers in the near future.

Among the main benefits, they leveraged AWS AMIs with the latest versions of Windows Server, avoiding significant investments in perpetual software licensing and benefiting from AWS’s pay-as-you-go pricing model. Security services like Inspector and WAF provide Aplicom with better visibility of findings or malicious traffic in their workloads. Additionally, monitoring, backup, and deployment across multiple availability zones have enabled Aplicom to operate and manage workload availability in a way that was challenging in their previous environments (local data centers).

AWS’s flexibility has allowed Aplicom to conduct service tests by enabling and disabling infrastructure based on demand.