Company summary
Located in the picturesque community of Mercer Island, Washington, the Mercer Island School District (MISD) provides high-quality education to all students. With a strong commitment to academic excellence, innovation, and community involvement, MISD serves over 4,000 students across its five schools. The district’s mission is to foster a learning environment where students are empowered to reach their full potential, become responsible citizens, and develop the skills necessary to thrive in a rapidly changing world. Guided by a vision of continuous improvement and equity for all, MISD works with parents, educators, and the broader community to ensure that every student can succeed.
The Challenge
Seeking a scalable cloud solution to replace on-premises backup system
Mercer Island primarily runs externally hosted applications such as the learning management system (LMS) Blackboard for its students. In this phase of its cloud journey, MISD was looking to migrate and improve its backup and recovery environment to the cloud. Its legacy backup system was an on-premises solution in a Hyper-V environment with an existing Barracuda security appliance.
The Solution
Integrating with Barracuda and providing secure storage in the AWS cloud
CloudHesive provided expert consulting services to Mercer Island School District, focusing on the design and implementation of a robust, secure, cloud-based backup and recovery system. The solution involved reviewing the existing on-premises Hyper-V environment and recommending a new AWS account structure architecture, integrated with Barracuda’s cybersecurity cloud extension.
The CloudHesive team designed the account structure with a focus on security, IAM roles, and network configuration. The team created an AWS account, configured an Identity Access Management (IAM) role for the existing Barracuda appliance, configured an Amazon S3 bucket for scalable storage, and then integrated those new AWS services with the legacy Barracuda backup system.
One particular feature of Amazon S3 CloudHesive chose because MISD wanted to ensure version control of all stored items. Amazon S3 has a feature that enables storage of multiple versions of an object in the same S3 bucket. This can be useful for protecting against accidental deletions, enabling data recovery, and tracking changes to objects over time.
CloudHesive also deployed Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to run backup processes, including deduplication, compression, and encryption before data is transferred to S3. Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) provided network isolation and security for the backup infrastructure, enabling Barracuda to operate within a private, secure network environment.
Barracuda’s backup appliances handle the initial data backup, data deduplication, and compression before transmitting it to AWS as well as replicating backups from on-premises appliances to AWS, ensuring data redundancy and availability in the cloud. Barracuda’s Cloud-to-Cloud Backup provides centralized management and monitoring for all Barracuda backup solutions, providing visibility and control over the backup processes.
For full visibility into the new backup and recovery system, CloudHesive deployed Amazon CloudWatch to monitor the health and performance of the backup infrastructure and AWS CloudTrail, to log API calls and other activities across MISD’s AWS environment, both crucial for auditing and compliance in backup scenarios.
The benefits
Gaining a secure, reliable backup system
CloudHesive delivered a secure, scalable, and fully configured AWS environment, supporting seamless backup and recovery integration from MISD’s existing Barracuda appliance to the AWS cloud. The MISD team now also has full visibility into its cloud backup system, making troubleshooting, auditing, and compliance easier.
Services that drive success
DevOps
- Deployment of Amazon VPC, Amazon EC for backup processes, Amazon S3 for storage
- Deployment of AWS IAM for least privilege access roles
- Deployment of Amazon CloudWatch for system monitoring and AWS CloudTrail for logging
- Built integration between Barracuda appliance and connection to AWS environment
Customer benefit summary
- Secure, scalable backup and recovery system in Amazon S3
- Integration with Barracuda
AWS Technologies used
- Amazon Elastic Compute Service (Amazon EC2)
- Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)
Third-party technologies used
Industry
Education
Segment
Public
Region
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