September, 2023
MediaAgility was acquired by Persistent in May 2022 and its capabilities form the foundation for Persistent’s Google Business Unit. As a Google Cloud Partner and a strategic IT Transformation services provider, the Google Business Unit is focused on delivering transformational services with cloud-native solutions that enable businesses to stay relevant and benefit from the public cloud platform capabilities.
Founded in 1989, Artnet is the leading online resource for the international art market where people buy, sell, and research art online. Managing the most comprehensive database of art in the world requires a strong infrastructure with high levels of security. However, their existing infrastructure had security, visibility, scalability, and management challenges.
The current infrastructure made it difficult for the marketplace to scale securely
To monitor the current infrastructure and ensure that all systems were running smoothly, Artnet had to dedicate resources to 24/7 monitoring. Despite that, many scalability issues were not addressable.
Artnet’s security vulnerability footprint was high. All maintenance was manual, and a dedicated team of resources was commissioned to keep the site running. They had fragmented silos of applications and data without a reliable way to link them together.
The Artnet team needed a solution that would allow them to spend more time developing competitive advantages rather than maintaining the existing infrastructure. In addition, a single source of truth was also required for combining web tracking data with operational data from various legacy systems.
‘Lift and Shift’ migration strategy to Google Cloud for added security and scalability
MediaAgility, which was acquired by Persistent Systems in May 2022 to form its Google-focused business unit (GBU), advised Artnet to migrate their on-prem infra to Google Cloud as the most appropriate infrastructure fit; given the cloud’s global scale and security. The shift was to help Artnet transform its IT infrastructure by moving to a secure and scalable public cloud.
Artnet and Persistent’s consultants worked together to chalk out a detailed, phased migration plan to modernize with rapid lift and shift and deployed robust Google Cloud infrastructure at scale.
Despite the fact that it became a much bigger effort, MediaAgility (acquired by Persistent Systems) still helped us finish the work and when we actually went to production, the launch went much more smoothly than we anticipated. As the team collaborated with my engineering teams, there was a tremendous amount of knowledge transfer and a willingness to go above and beyond to get the results we needed
Matthew Cochran, CTO, Artnet
The public cloud IT transformation experts at Persistent established the foundational data pipelining capabilities.
Some of the Google Cloud and other products that were used include:
- Velostrata was used to migrate applications from on-prem to GCP
- Cloud Interconnect was set up to secure the connections
- Cloud Monitoring (formerly Stackdriver) provided better resource monitoring at a lower cost compared to their previous implementation
- BigQuery was leveraged for daily user insights
- Terraform helped in infrastructure provisioning automation with minimal to no manual intervention
The solution implementation helped increase operational efficiency by 280X
Through code-based infrastructure provisioning automation and public cloud IT transformation, Artnet significantly reduced infrastructure provisioning costs. Also, Google Cloud enabled them to scale their products in real-time and improve their system stability. Additionally, they achieved compliance and data security using Security Command Center and Identity Aware Proxy.
Since their migration to Google Cloud, Artnet now operates a very stable and highly reliable infrastructure that allows them to focus on the strategic initiatives that will drive their future growth and profitability
Joseluis Gonzalez, VP – Operations, Google Business Unit, Persistent Systems
DataDog integration enables Artnet to monitor its infrastructure with ease. Many systems that would have had sustained outages are now stable. Originally, Artnet’s entire team and Persistent’s resources were required to finish a task within eight months. As a result of the project, they were able to finish a similar task in one day with just two engineers, increasing efficiency by 280x.
Persistent’s MSP partnership with Artnet
After migrating to Google Cloud, Artnet has been receiving continued support from Persistent through the Managed Services offering to not just maintain the growing complexity of the IT system but also improve it.
We provide services to architect, operationalize, and optimize cloud infrastructure to achieve cost efficiency and accelerate modernization.
Scope of MSP Services
Manage and operate
- Customer support model, ticketing, event logging, and analytics
- Proactive monitoring and alerting, incident management
- SLA management and reporting
End-to-end managed services
- Managed services scope and operating model aligned with business objectives and goals
- Certified Google Cloud Architects to support cloud architecture design and infrastructure setup and a certified team to support workload and infrastructure management to provide support
- End-to-end IT governance for tracking alignment with business objectives, setting, and tracking SLAs and benchmarks and monitoring and measuring cost as well as operational efficiencies.
Technical Architect Manager
- We have assigned a Technical Architect to work closely with Artnet to provide strategic, technical, and operational consulting and advice with all the best practices on Google Cloud Platform
- Personal oversight of technical onboarding and initial environment deployment on GCP
- Ongoing business and technical assistance, including analyzing account metrics and conducting regular account reviews
- Identification and prioritization of recommendations that optimize for cost, security, utilization, inventory management, and cloud best practices
- Implementation of industry-leading deployment standards
- Collaboration with solutions architect to define architectures that meet business objectives
Technical Support
We provide Tier 2 technical support for the Google Cloud service requests.
Tech Stack Supported: Compute, data archival, identity security, marketplace, MySQL/Postgresql migration, Networking, VM Migration
To provide exceptional customer service to our esteemed client, we are using ServiceNow, as the ITSM tool.
We guarantee Artnet’s compliance with SLA in connection with the maximum time frame for an effective response.
