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How a Media Company Restored Secure Data Access by Migrating to Google Cloud in an Express Mode

Year
2019
Services
Cloud migration
Time assemble a team
1 week
Team size
4 developers
Deadline
3 months

Media company

A US-based company with an office in Europe helps advertisers and marketers increase ad efficiency through advanced personalization, ROI measurement, and better targeting. With the Client’s solution brands are now able to serve customers with more relevant ads and, at the same time, remain privacy-compliant.

About the project

Following the partition from the parent company and facing expiration of support contract in their Data Center, the Client was forced to move all data to Google Cloud Platform, the ultimate destination for any Client’s technical resources.

Our tasks

Moving all data to Google Cloud Platform

Locating all Client’s technical resources in Google Cloud and preparing its environment for further use following the expiration of the support contract with a parent company.

Keeping data secure

Operating with sensitive client data, our team had to ensure data security and handling data in separate environments.

Performing the migration within a strict deadline

Finishing the migration within 3 months was a crucial requirement the Client based its vendor selection process on.

01

Challenges

1. Completing migration within 3 months

Looking for a software agency to finish the project on a short deadline, the Client approached Neoteric. After accepting the project details, we deployed a team of developers who later performed migration within the next 3 months.

2. Ensuring high data security

As the Client operated with sensitive data our team of developers had to perform migration following strict security rules and best practices.

The most exciting and challenging part of the LR project was to rewrite a big process, implemented with old technologies and bad manners. We moved it entirely to the cloud using the newest GCP tools and we automated all stages of the process

Sebastian Łoś, Software Engineer at Neoteric

02

Solutions

1. Ensuring frictionless communication from the start

During the visit of Client’s data scientists in Neoteric’s headquarters in Gdańsk we saw a fit in work culture between our teams. This resulted in kicking off the project and dispatching the team of Neoteric’s developers to one of the Client’s offices in Europe. This decision was necessary and we gladly did it as we wanted to ensure frictionless communication.
Moreover, we perceived this aspect as crucial to finish a project on time. The team of our engineers visited the Client for one week to gather domain knowledge and transfer requirements into a well-organized backlog. Spending more time with the Client on the ground was an indispensable factor to streamline communication and finishing the project on a short timescale.

2. Rewriting the speech recognition code in a simpler way

To adequately secure sensitive data, we used a protected subnet of a GCP project with limited Internet access. Terraform was used to easily create the dev, stage and prod environments and to implement a good practise of code infrastructure.
As the Client wanted to make a copy of prod, and then iterate on it to add new changes, we used Terraform to create the Prod GCP project.
Our team also had to ensure easier security remediation, disaster recovery, and environment management with minimal manual configuration. Therefore, we introduced replaceable VMs and data storage on an isolated file.

3. Handling PII & nPII data in separate environments

Our team worked with both PII or Personally-Identifiable Information that stands for any data used to identify a person, e.g. email address, first name, last name, and nPII, the information that cannot be used on its own to identify or trace a person – age, sex, type of house, postal code. These two types of information had to be handled in separate environments – the isolation of data was a project requirement.

4. Establishing close-knit cooperation with the Client’s team

A team of 4 Neoteric developers worked on the project for the Client’s Data Science team. We established close-knit cooperation between our teams – by introducing daily standups and conducting all project meetings together. As a result, thanks to more effective communication, our team got a better understanding of the Client’s daily work.

Technology we used

Google Cloud Function

Google Cloud Function

Identity-Aware Proxy

Oracle DB

Squid Server

VPC Service Controls

03

Project Results

A tech team Assembling within 1 week

Knowing how crucial the timing was, we managed to assemble a team of developers within a week and kick off the project in the Client’s office in Paris.

Complying with a project deadline

Thanks to a smooth communication flow the migration to Google Cloud Platform from Axciom DataCenter was successfully performed within an expected deadline and a Client acquired a secure access to data storage. After successful and timely completion of the project, the Client decided to continue cooperation with us – this time on SPIR platform migration.

Continuing cooperation after project completion

We assigned the same team to this project because they had knowledge and a good understanding of the project goals. The team, together with the Product Owner (form the Client’s side), prepared suggestions about how we could approach the SPIR project. The main goal was to assess the feasibility of SPIR migration out of the Datacenter. The scope of the project contained FastStat migration and OracleDB migration.

Conclusion

Our team of developers conducted a successful migration of the client’s technical resources to Google Cloud ensuring sensitive data is properly secured. The project was finished within an expected deadline of 3 months. After the project finished the Client decided to continue cooperation with us on the next project.

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