We are moving our infrastructure to the state-of-the-art Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud platform.
Find answers to your questions about the migration and what it means for you below.
Q. Why are you migrating to AWS?
EngagementHQ was born in Australia in 2007 with a vision to make a difference globally on how communities and public agencies work together. Over the last decade, we have spread our wings and grown to serve clients and their communities across Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and USA. And the journey is just beginning.
Along with this growth came the need to host EHQ in four separate locations globally to fulfill the strict in-country hosting, data security and data privacy requirements that our clients need to operate within.
The lack of a standard hosting offering across the four locations has meant that, to meet these requirements, we have had to use different hosting options - IBM Softlayer, AWS and our own dedicated servers in the separate regions.
That all changed at the end of 2016 with AWS opening data centers in Canada and the UK. This has finally made it possible for us to standardise hosting across all our regions and to rethink our hosting architecture and supporting processes; giving us the opportunity to simplify operations and to further improve our service offering.
Q. That’s great but how exactly does this benefit us?
Whilst there will be no immediately visible benefit to you as a result of this transition, it allows us to further improve the service and to stay on top of evolving security and compliance needs going forward.
Q. Are there any changes to the software or service?
There will be absolutely no changes to the software or service as a result of this move. All of the commitments we have made to you in the form of in-country hosting, security and privacy practices, SLAs, software functionality and technical support remain unchanged.
We have designed the transition to ensure that there is minimal change and disruption through the process.
Q. Will my data still be hosted in-country?
Yes, absolutely!
The changes will be only to the location of your data, within your jurisdiction, as outlined in the table below.
|
Country |
Current location |
New location (after migration) |
|
Australia |
Global Switch, Sydney (West) |
AWS, Asia Pacific (Sydney) |
|
Canada |
IBM Softlayer, Montreal |
AWS, Canada (Central) |
|
UK |
IBM Softlayer, London |
AWS, EU (London) |
|
USA |
IBM Softlayer, Dallas |
AWS, US West (N. California) |
Q. Are AWS as good as IBM Softlayer, Global Switch or any other hosting providers?
In short, they are better.
AWS is the leading cloud hosting provider on the planet by a long way. Their suite of products and services, security controls, scalability, reliability, astonishing number of datacenters, flexibility and continued innovation make them the absolute best choice for hosting in the cloud.
They are the leading cloud provider in terms of compliance as well with certifications for ISO 27001, SOC 1, 2 & 3, IRAP and more. See https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/ for the full list.
Q. When are you starting the migration to AWS?
We will be migrating sites starting from the 1st of July. We will do this over a few weeks, one region at a time, to ensure that the migration can be carried out with minimal disruption to you and your communities.
Q. Will you let me know before you migrate our site across to AWS?
Yes, we will give you 2-3 days notice with an exact day and time window for when your site will be migrated. This notification will appear on the site itself, when you log in, as well as via email.
Q. What do I need to do to make sure that the migrations proceed smoothly?
Nothing, we will take care of the entire process and you will not even notice the change.
Q. We manage our own domain name, is that going to be a problem?
That shouldn’t be a problem. We are already in touch with you or your IT team about updating your domain name settings (DNS entries), if required.
If you have heard from us, we would appreciate if you could hasten the process as it would be nice to have this completed well in time.
Q. What time of day will the migrations be carried out? Not during business hours I hope.
We will carry out the service upgrade outside of business hours.
We expect that the upgrade will start after 11pm and complete no later than 5am. Our dry runs suggest total downtime will be between 2 to 4 hours.
Q. Will there will be an outage message on the site during this time?
Yes, we will display a message to all site visitors that a service upgrade is in progress for the entire duration of the migration.
Q. I have more questions, who do I ask?
Please email them in to support@engagementhq.com. We love hearing from you!