About the Company
KMC is an adaptive training and insights platform, powered by agile experts who manage it for you. Companies use the KMC platform as their own SaaS platform for their clients to sell access to courses and course paths, and to deliver internal corporate compliance, HR, management, professional development, executive education, and other types of courses to their employees, teams, and leadership.
The Challenge
KMC’s sensitive training video archives are generated by an external video archival application hosted on premises. The archives are actively accessed for the first 30 days and only rarely, on demand, after that. Since the files are sensitive, KMC was concerned about their safety and wanted to avoid a single point of failure and satisfy compliance needs while keeping costs optimal. The files were copied by hand to an external hard drive, which was then taken off-site for storage: slow, and one more step where a person could make a mistake. KMC wanted the backup automated, with copies kept off-site, at a low cost and within its compliance requirements.
Solution
The 9Acts team evaluated the use case and proposed moving the archives to AWS, using Amazon S3 for scalable storage and AWS Transfer Family to transfer files securely into Amazon S3. The solution uses AWS Transfer Family to transfer files from the video archive app over SFTP, an Amazon S3 bucket for scalable, secure storage, and Amazon S3 Glacier for low-cost long-term archival storage, with data-at-rest and in-transit encryption configured throughout.
The AWS Transfer Family server is hosted in a VPC across Availability Zones with Elastic IP addresses, and its security group allows traffic only from the video archival app. The video archival app is configured to use SSH auth for file transfer, which means that only users with the correct credentials can access the files.
The Amazon S3 bucket is configured with versioning for data security and accepts files only over encrypted connections, which protects the archives in transit. However, one of the primary requirements is cost optimization, and costs may go up over time as data grows. So we set up lifecycle rules to move the data to Amazon S3 Glacier based on the access patterns of the video archives. We also built the entire solution as infrastructure as code (IaC), following best practices.
Outcome
Our solution successfully addressed the customer’s need for secure and scalable storage of sensitive video archives. We were able to save them money by using Amazon S3 with pay-as-you-go pricing, as well as eliminating manual effort in backing up data. The archive sits in Amazon S3, which AWS designs for 99.99% availability and 11 nines of durability; files arrive over SFTP and move automatically to Amazon S3 Glacier to keep storage costs down. By implementing this approach, KMC can rest assured that its archives are safe from loss or damage, while also saving time and money on archival storage costs.