How Entrata achieved 20% monthly savings on AWS cloud spend

Lightstream Cloud Managed Services gives Entrata the tools to successfully migrate to the cloud and optimize the operational, security and financial aspects of its environment

Business Challenge

Since its inception in 2003, Entrata has prided itself on developing innovative solutions for the property management industry. That innovation is what allows the company to deliver on its pledge to make life easier for property owners, managers and residents. From property management software that simplifies accounting and purchasing to complete automation that enables remote lighting, locks, thermostats, Entrata’s suite of products is as comprehensive as it is state of the art.

Entrata first connected with Lightstream in 2011 as the company’s IT leaders sought to upgrade network connectivity and performance while reducing costs. In the years that followed, Entrata’s IT team came to rely on Lightstream for help overcoming technological challenges and improving the efficiency, reliability and security of their IT operations. As the company expanded and technology evolved, it became evident that moving certain applications and resources to the cloud would be beneficial to the organization and its customers. Migrating from on-premises to the cloud would allow the company to innovate faster and at a global scale.

Once again, Entrata turned to long-time partner Lightstream for assistance with this migration. After selecting AWS as its cloud service provider (CSP), the next step was ensuring that the best practices, tools, expertise, financial incentives and partner ecosystem offered by AWS were implemented to make cloud adoption easier. Lightstream’s extensive experience with the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) – a comprehensive and proven cloud migration program – enabled its engineers to provide Entrata with expert guidance through the often-complicated process. MAP consists of a three-phase journey that helps customers leverage the performance, security and reliability of the cloud while reducing complexity and costs.

The migration was a success, and Entrata quickly saw the enhanced innovation, elevated customer experience and digital transformation possible within the cloud. Before long Entrata’s director of engineering knew the time was right to migrate even more applications and resources to the cloud. Upon discussing this with his Lightstream representatives, he also understood that there was an opportunity to optimize the financial, technical, security and operational aspects of their current environment.

Solution

As a platinum-level Lightstream Cloud Managed Services customer, Entrata began taking advantage of the tools that ensure the ideal management and optimization of its cloud environment. This comprehensive advisory service also lifts some of the burden off of the internal IT department, as Lightstream’s partnership with AWS and its AWS Advance Consulting certification assists the organization in determining the ideal migration path for its additional infrastructure and applications.

To maximize Entrata’s savings with AWS, Lightstream assisted with the negotiation and management of the company’s contracting for AWS Enterprise Discount Plan (EDP). Additionally, Lightstream adjusted Entrata’s Elastic Block Store (EBS) Provisioned IOPS and EBS-Optimized instances to optimize its storage within Amazon EC2. Provisioned IOPS are an EBS volume type designed to deliver predictable, high performance for I/O intensive workloads, such as database applications, that rely on consistent and fast response times. Ongoing management assures that the IOPS are periodically adjusted according to the organization’s actual needs and avoids overprovisioning.

Business Outcomes

The ongoing optimization of the operational, security and financial aspects of Entrata’s cloud environment is currently saving the company approximately 20% of their total AWS spend per month. Quarterly meetings between Lightstream and Entrata allow the teams to come together to review infrastructure performance and provides the company with ongoing recommendations on what actions can be taken to continue to save money and enhance efficiency and security.

Entrata has steadily grown from a software development startup to a successful user experience organization offering a full suite of services that takes the complexity out of property management. Throughout the years, the company’s relationship with Lightstream has evolved from that of a basic vendor/client exchange to a true technology partnership.

Entrata is currently expanding into international territories, a growth strategy that has been made possible due to its cloud infrastructure. Despite the economic downturn of 2020-2021, Entrata has continued to flourish and increase business. One opportunity the organization may want to consider in the near future is to migrate its gp2 volumes to Amazon’s new gp3 volumes, which are the next-generation general purpose SSD volumes for EBS that would enable Entrata to provision performance independent of storage capacity and take advantage of up to 20% lower price-point per GB than its existing gp2 volumes. As the organization moves forward in its cloud journey, Lightstream is standing by to help the company achieve continued innovation and growth.