About The John F Kennedy Center for Performing Arts
The Kennedy Center is the nation's busiest performing arts center, hosting approximately 2,000 events each year for audiences numbering more than 2 million. Since 1971, we have been bringing the world to Washington with magnificent performances of music, dance, theater, and more.
The Kennedy Center's on-premise hardware was nearing its End Of Life and the organization was spending a high percentage of their time on addressing hardware failures. The Kennedy Center worked with Kickstep Technologies to explore options which would address this concern, including upgrading their internal technology stack, outsourcing their infrastructure needs to a 3rd party or migrating their technology stack to an IaaS provider. Kickstep helped perform a TCO analysis of Kennedy's options which demonstrated that moving forward with AWS as their IaaS provider was in the long term best interest.
The Challenge
Kennedy Center had a number of challenges in migrating their infrastructure away from their on-prem configuration. These challenges included:
- Zero disruption to day-to-day operational practices
- Cost management and accounting
- Federated security controls
- PCI Compliance
- Technical training and governance
The Solution
Kickstep Technologies was able to utilize several AWS services to meet the challenges presented by Kennedy Center. These included:
- Leveraging AWS Cloud Adoption Framework to address governance, training and implementation concerns
- Working with AWS Account and Architecture teams to validate our governance, architecture and execution at various stages of the project
- AWS Support for SAML-based Federated Access to map AD groups to IAM roles across various accounts
- AWS Organizations to centralized billing, auditing and policy controls while allowing teams and business units a certain level of self-service autonomy through AWS Service Catalog.
- Various AWS networking, security, migration and storage services to enable to "Lift and Shift" strategies.
The Benefits
Benefit 1 - Central management of billing, security, auditing, and policy controls while also enabling team-level flexibility and autonomy of their respective technology and business solutions.
Benefit 2 - Reduced TCO relative to their on-premise environment. This was primarily realized by:
- Paying only for capacity which is needed at any one time
- Existing operations staff could manage/support more assets
- Lower on-prem costs associated with space, power, and infrastructure
Benefit 3 - Better agility from two perspectives:
- The organization can respond faster to classical requests, e.g. new server deployment based on existing AMIs
- The ability to start developing solutions using cloud architectures, e.g. Serverless/API based solutions
About Kickstep Technologies, Inc and Amazon Web Services
Kickstep Technologies is a leading technology firm providing cloud consulting, software development, data analytics and machine learning services. We use our experience to ensure clients have the best technical solutions to solve their business challenges and deliver value for their organization. We are fully committed to the success of our clients and commit to always putting their needs and interests before our own.