Bespin Global guides Midwest Tape’s digital transformation from legacy systems to the cloud by leveraging Amazon Web Services.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Empowering Midwest Tape's Digital Transformation: Leveraging Amazon Web Services to Create a Scalable and Adaptive Solution for Sustainable Growth

Midwest Tape, facing the limitations of its on-premises legacy infrastructure, chose Bespin Global, an AWS Premier Tier Consulting Partner with Migration Competency, for a strategic cloud migration program. With Bespin Global’s assistance, they effectively migrated their on-premises Oracle database with 13 TB of data to the cloud, ensuring a secure and reliable transition. Along with this move, Midwest Tape built cloud foundations for a Data Lake and AI services to modernize its platform, enhancing their capacity to serve customers more efficiently.

HIGHLIGHTS

• Migrated 13 TB data from Oracle on-premises database to Amazon RDS in four months, achieving a 100% success rate

• Enhanced user engagement through AI/ML platform, delivering 80% accurate digital title recommendations, increasing borrowing rates and click-through rates (CTRs)

• Achieved zero instances of data loss throughout the entire migration process

• Simplified data lake build process with Lake Formation and Terraform based code deployment

ABOUT CUSTOMER

A trusted partner for libraries around the globe

Midwest Tape is a leading provider of entertainment media products and services to libraries. They offer a wide range of media content, including movies, audiobooks, and music. Midwest Tape assists libraries in curating, processing, and cataloging their collections. It also offers more than 2.3 million digital titles ranging from eBooks and TV shows to comic books and musical works through its digital platform, hoopla.

THE CHALLENGE

Growth projections necessitate a technological overhaul

Midwest Tape and its hoopla platform provide streaming content and support to over 5,000 libraries and their patrons across the U.S., Canada and Australia. It anticipated doubling in size over the coming years as it continuously adds more content and even more libraries worldwide. Midwest Tape needed to undergo a significant technological overhaul due to legacy on-premises workloads.

“Due to limitations with their database licensing, it was important for them to embark on a data modernization initiative, with migrating their database to the cloud as the first step,” says Pratik Shah, Director of Engineering at Bespin Global. The on-premises database relied on real application clusters using the standard Oracle database version, causing data volume constraints along with other limitations.

To support its continued growth and increase efficiency, security, and reliability, Midwest Tape needed to modernize and reframe their library and digital processes, moving them to the cloud while maintaining data integrity and reliability for its current customers. The Midwest Tape team reached out to Bespin Global to advise, guide, and implement their digital transformation.

SOLUTION

Bespin Global leverages Amazon Web Services to guide and facilitate Midwest Tape’s digital transformation

Bespin Global collaborated with Amazon Web Service (AWS), a cloud-computing platform offering more than 120 cloud services across categories like storage, analytics, databases, and more. The flexibility, scalability, and efficiency of AWS, combined with Bespin Global’s migration expertise, established AWS as the best solution for supporting Midwest Tape’s growth. Bespin Global leveraged AWS Migration Assistance Program (MAP) that allows businesses to migrate their programs and applications to AWS quickly and efficiently and provides cost benefits with funding to offset migration costs.

The complexity of the migration required multiple workloads. The first was creating a solid foundation for the entire project. Bespin Global helped Midwest Tape to implement a comprehensive multi-account strategy by leveraging AWS Control Tower to enhance the operational excellence of its organizational units across hoopla, e-commerce, and internal, and create new accounts by business unit and environment. This process facilitated seamless provisioning of development, staging, QA, and production environments within each business unit, while ensuring a smooth migration and organization of existing workloads.

Next, Bespin Global implemented a strategic migration initiative to transition the existing Oracle database server infrastructure to Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) infrastructure. The project addressed a pivotal business application heavily reliant on an on-premises Oracle database. This provided Midwest Tape with substantial advantages that cloud technology offers, including vertical scaling, heightened availability, optimized performance, and robust business continuity.

“Because of Midwest Tape’s on-premises solution complexity, available AWS technology was not suited to do the migration in an automated or quick manner,” says Avineet Agarwalla, AI/ML Bespin consultant. “The legacy system made it difficult to perform the migration and it needed a lot of manual effort.” Bespin Global worked closely with Midwest Tape’s technical team to meticulously execute a series of comprehensive trials to evaluate various data migration strategies. After a thorough assessment, they formulated a robust data migration strategy and utilized AWS Data Migration Services (DMS) to proficiently transfer over 1,000 large tables to the Oracle RDS platform. Notably, the migration process adhered rigorously to industry-leading best practices, ensuring a seamless and secure transition to the cloud environment.

Finally, Bespin Global successfully modernized and migrated Midwest Tape’s on-premises data workloads to the AWS Cloud, optimizing operations through building a Data Lake on AWS. This facilitated seamless data ingestion, processing, storage, and analysis, with regular updates to ensure the accuracy and relevance of insights.

“The Midwest Tape team had to really modernize their data and AI workloads so they could provide more insights for library users who were looking for certain content,” explained Shah. “They wanted to provide recommendation systems, and they were able to do that by implementing an AI solution using AWS Personalize. By executing a comprehensive migration and integration of personalized recommendations powered by AI and AWS infrastructure, Midwest Tape facilitated the delivery of tailored recommendations to patrons to increase revenue.

RESULTS & BENEFITS

Midwest Tape sees increased accuracy, efficiency, and user engagement after successful cloud migration

The successful cloud migration allows Midwest Tape to reduce its dependency on on-premises workloads, ensuring the company remains agile and positioned for future growth and success. The robust and future-oriented framework promotes enhanced efficiency and reliability for current workloads, as well as scalability and maintainability for future growth.

Implementation of Data Lake on AWS provided a unified platform to allow business users to access enterprise data for real-time analytics. It also increased speed, accuracy, and efficiency for future workloads ingested from new sources. In addition, Bespin Global gave Midwest Tape resources for future rapid data source integration in the Data Lake. “We had them templatize best practices on the infrastructure they were using,” says Agarwalla. “We gave the capability and the training to both the end users and the support staff who would be continuing on once we disconnected from their environment.” Now, Midwest Tape’s customers receive 80% accurate recommendations for their digital titles, resulting in increased borrowing and click-through rates. These enhancements effectively increased user engagement and retention, fostering recurring visits and amplifying borrowing activity within the digital library.

Bespin Global also achieved seamless migration from Oracle on-premises database to Amazon RDS leveraging AWS native DMS. They successfully and flawlessly migrated 13 TB of data, validating both business and data parameters and maintaining data integrity throughout the process with zero instances of data loss. Midwest Tape experienced business operations efficiencies and automated functionalities as a result of the cloud-based database architecture and the scalability it provided.

Bespin Global will continue to support Midwest Tape by designing a digital transformation map for their entire enterprise technology platforms. This process will identify goal processes to be migrated or modernized to continue Midwest Tape’s digital transformation. Additionally, Bespin Global will provide insights and guidance on an ongoing basis.