Switching service providers? Yes, you can! – Ayyeka success story

Ayyeka connects decision-makers to their remote assets, so they can make better and more timely decisions.

Their Industrial IoT solutions for remote monitoring enable asset owners and operators to achieve enhanced compliance and improved efficiency across the board. Hardware, software, and digital services are merged to deliver an end-to-end experience and value when connecting asset and infrastructure networks to data systems.

“Our platform is somewhat complex, involving hardware devices, wireless communication and a cloud platform. In addition, we are working with critical infrastructure owners such as water utilities, municipalities, and government agencies. Apart from having adequate technical skills, any service provider that wants to work with us needs to have the motivation and commitment to learn our business “ – Dr. Yair Poleg, CTO & Co-Founder of Ayyeka.

The Challenge

Ayyeka has their solution deployed across multiple AWS regions and around several partners which adds an additional layer of complexity to their cloud management.

Since 2016, Ayyeka has been working with an AWS partner as a result of a strategic decision to dedicate their internal R&D resources to their product rather than to DevOps. With a very stringent SLA, they needed to have a 24\7 managed NOC service with eyes on the glass that could also manage Ayyeka’s monitoring stack and incident response processes.

At the beginning of 2019, Ayyeka noticed that the levels of quality and service they were expecting from their managed service provider started to decline, and that their service provider basically lost the “personal touch” that was very important to Ayyeka as a growing startup. Requests for tasks or change management took longer and longer, internal processes delayed delivery of key milestones and a cumbersome implementation added additional costs.

Furthermore, Ayyeka took a strategic decision to redesign their cloud production infrastructure to support their future growth and development, whilst maintaining freedom regarding the tooling needed to support this initiative and avoid service provider “lock-in” and unnecessary billing charges.

The Solution

Ayyeka and MoovingON, an AWS Partner, started working together in the middle of 2019. The engagement started first by reviewing, understanding, and taking ownership of the Ayyeka infrastructure at that time with a focus on analyzing the metrics and alerts received from Datadog, Ayyeka’s monitoring solution of choice. The team at MoovingON optimized and fine-tuned the alerts received from Datadog and managed to reduce the number of alerts from thousands to dozens, resulting in a more accurate monitoring in order to ease the DevOps and R&D teams who are on-call. Robust dashboards, developed using years of monitoring experience, allowed Ayyeka to gain real-time insights into the status of their cloud production environment and updated and improved runbooks fostered knowledge capturing and sharing, enabling MoovingON to provide an efficient and effective 24\7 managed NOC service.

The next step was assisting Ayyeka redesign key components in their cloud deployment, and was reflected in helping with ongoing tasks and various key projects, such as migrating from a commercially licensed firewall solution to an open source one, which significantly reduced costs for Ayyeka, all while maintaining and improving their security policies and practices.

As managing cloud production workloads, especially for SaaS companies, is a never-ending task, using MoovingON.ai, the company’s CloudOps platform, Ayyeka connected all of their monitoring systems, centralized all of their cloud production data and correlated them with automated runbooks for fast and accurate remediation. Escalation routes were defined and configured using MoovingON.ai robust on-call capabilities, ensuring the right people are notified and act immediately.

“At the end of the day, relationships between partners are based on the people.
MoovingON is extremely competent and proactive in managing AWS cloud production workloads, but what really made a huge difference was their overall sense of urgency towards the availability and uptime of their customers. They are always on, always responsive, and it feels as if they are a true part of the Ayyeka team. This is exactly what we expect from our partners.” – Dr. Poleg

Summary

Switching service providers is never an easy decision and is almost always accompanied by concerns and high costs. However, the cost of stagnation can easily outrun the cost of innovation, and technology companies should take advantage of a more open and transparent relationship with their service providers. By fostering a mentality of collaboration, true customer centricity, and professionalism, Ayyeka was able to find a partner with the fundamental elements on a journey to mutual success and growth.