About the customer

Stour Marine is a small UK Mobile Network Operator, which offers the following types of services: voice, messaging and data both retail and wholesale, and works with a large range of third party companies via encrypted and secure connections.

How could Geko help Stour Marine?

Stour Marine had all the service infrastructure in a physical data center and Geko helped us with our network virtualization, using AWS as a provider, with the main objective of advising them on the best practices of secure architectures and achieving a migration model as cloud friendly possible.

“Geko Cloud was the perfect partner for our experience and knowledge of cloud environments, knowledge in communications, networks and decentralized platform architecture.”

What was the starting situation?

The starting point was a proprietary security platform (a vendor software), that is, with a high level of complexity in the network structure.

Project challenges

For the migration of its infrastructure we had to take into account several points to achieve a successful deployment:

• Simplify the entire network model using a cloud-friendly approach
• Create a solid base structure to grow, without losing security or functionality
• Standardize the entire cloud platform to maintain services
• Eliminate old complexity
• Provide ease of management for the Stour Marine team.

Project development

For the migration of its infrastructure we had to take into account several points to achieve a successful deployment:

• A first phase of review and onboarding, in which we connect to their on-premise platform where we collect all the information they had in their system: public ips, routing, etc. Next, we designed and proposed a first draft of the cloud solution.
• In the second phase of construction and implementation, once the proposal was accepted, we began to deploy the entire structure using Terraform, and jointly deployed the services with them, to facilitate the transfer of knowledge through peering methodology.

At all times, during the project, it was segmented into epics and small deliverables that were contrasted synchronously with the client.

Improvements experienced

With the implementation to the cloud, Stour Marine can migrate their services in a solvent and secure way in the cloud, taking advantage of the managed services of AWS that will allow them to neglect the operational part and the associated costs of your previous physical infrastructure, in addition to the maintenance and operation are simplified much more.

Used technologies

A model based on VPC segmentation and centralization of communications using AWS Transit Gateway services was proposed.

All communications with third parties were deployed with the side-to-side VPN services, and a private connection was also made with the different VPCs of the third parties.

Finally, the high availability signaling nodes were deployed and an information sharing platform was configured using the AWS EFS service.