Our customers share their stories of successful collaboration
Case
Creating more time to focus on the core business, powered and backed by a cloud partnership
Sycada partners with public transit companies, cab services, and maintenance providers aiming to reduce their carbon footprint. To stay ahead of modern developments and prepare for further growth, Sycada’s management decided to migrate to the AWS cloud. We guided them through the entire process, ensuring a smooth transition. Now, with the technical aspects highly available and fully managed—from hardware and maintenance to power and network connectivity—Sycada can focus entirely on their core business.
“Cambrian Technologies helped us migrate from on-premises to AWS. Transitioning to the cloud involves several one-time actions, and it's hard to maintain a certain skill level if you only do things once. Because Cambrian Technologies manages the transition for a great number of customers, their skills regarding things like network technology, platform security and best practices are top notch. They supported us setting up a secure and distributed, highly-available infrastructure and helped us understand and deploy new services. Their experts didn't just offer plenty of helpful advice during the process, but actually rolled up their sleeves and got to work. In every step we are taking, their involvement allows us to move faster.”
The customer
Sycada was founded by Kristian Winge from Greenland, who strongly believes profit and sustainability can go hand in hand. They partner with public transit companies, cab companies and maintenance services who want to decrease their carbon footprint. Smart technology like DriveTag, a fuel efficiency app developed by Sycada, saves these companies millions of gallons annually.
From their offices in Amsterdam, Munich and Athens, Sycada serves more than 1,000 enterprise customers throughout Europe. It’s absolutely vital that their customers’ applications are up and running 24/7.
The challenge
To keep up with modern developments and be ready for further growth, Sycada’s management decided to move to the cloud in 2019. They chose to go with Amazon Web Services (AWS) because that provider was the largest, and offered the widest range of technologies and market knowledge.
Although they know a lot about enterprise applications at Sycada, cloud services and AWS were new to them. Once upon a time, the company had started out with a single server in the hallway closet that eventually moved to a data center’s server rack. In short, they were used to a world where you could buy resources and watch them run, so to speak. But when you move to the cloud, different rules apply. And because the implementation of those different rules requires different technology, they approached us to help them out.
The solution
We guided Sycada through the entire process. First, we replicated the existing platform to make it run on virtual servers. Once that was taken care of, we made the platform server-less, so Sycada could take full advantage of all the benefits working in the cloud has to offer.
That’s not all, though. To ensure that Sycada’s developers can update their software while keeping the platform up and running, we introduced and deployed small, parallel containers. This setup allows them to deploy automated software updates while the system remains available.
The results
In a nutshell: Sycada now has plenty of time to focus on their core business, since the technical and infrastructural aspects are taken care of – everything from hardware and maintenance, to power and network connectivity is under control.
Another big benefit for Sycada and their customers is the additional reliability AWS offers. After all, the data centers are grouped into Availability Zones (AZs), which in turn are grouped into Regions. Should some of the containers or services go down, the platform continues to run smoothly.
Finally, the AWS cloud allows them to adjust their costs as their usage increases. For a platform with growth ambitions and fluctuating server loads, this is a perfect match.