About Sorenson Communications, LLC

Sorenson Communications LLC connects people by delivering the world’s most trusted service and innovative products for the Deaf, which include Sorenson Video Relay Service (VRS®), the highest-quality video interpreting service; the ntouch® VP and the ntouch VP2 videophones, designed especially for use by Deaf individuals; ntouch PC, software that connects users to SVRS by using a PC and webcam; ntouch for Mac®, software that connects users to SVRS by using an Apple® computer; and ntouch Mobile, an application empowering SVRS communication via tablet and mobile devices. Sorenson is the leading provider of Video Relay Service.

The Challenge

Sorenson was operating a legacy LAMP Stack on an on-premises data center for their corporate website. A LAMP Stack is a combined package intended for web development and is an acronym for four open-source components: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. However, Sorenson faced the challenge and limitations of this legacy system, including the extensive cost and complexity of managing and upgrading their aging hardware needed to run this on premises.

Why AWS

To continue to support the communication needs of the Deaf Community, Sorenson Communications turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS) to determine if migrating their customer facing website to this platform will deliver solutions faster and more reliably to their customers. In addition, Sorenson’s team reached out to 1Strategy, a Premier Consulting Partner in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner Network (APN), for their expert direction on best practices and practical solutions when migrating to the AWS Cloud.

Sorenson’s Senior Systems engineer, Dave Cloes, had favorable past experience with AWS and this was a key contributing factor in selecting AWS over other cloud service providers. “Sorenson’s solutions are critical for the deaf and hard-of-hearing community,” said Cloes. “With AWS, we determined that we will be able to provide these solutions, maintaining our highest qualities in a real-life setting, while scaling to support and meet the demands for our customers.”

The Benefits

With the help of 1Strategy, Sorenson began their journey to migrate their corporate website to AWS in two separate phases. Phase 1 consisted of rehosting or commonly referred to as a lift and shift migration. 1Strategy moved their existing website from their on-premises hardware to AWS with zero downtime at launch.

For Phase 2, 1Strategy created a new, production-ready WordPress copy of Sorenson’s corporate website hosted on AWS. This enables Sorenson to have their site highly available and scalable, while including native AWS services integration. When deployed, it will replace the existing corporate website and can be launched later according to Sorenson’s future plans.

Both of these phases required a fully functional development, test, and production environments to ensure that the launch of each website was successful. Monitoring of AWS resources was also paramount.

Sorenson reports that by migrating their corporate website to AWS has benefited the company in many ways including:

1. Availability: Sorenson is able to make their website on AWS highly available and redundant by utilizing multi-Availability Zone (AZ) deployment.
2. Scalability: With tens of thousands of website visitors each week there was a prodigious need to be able to scale up and down based on the way their website traffic ebbs and flows. AWS offeres Sorenson the ability to spin up the correct amount of EC2 instances during the peak of customer traffic while not having to pay for overprovisioning during traffic lulls.

In addition to the low cost, elasticity, flexibility, and scalable benefits Sorenson will gain from migrating to AWS, the company was able to retire some aging hardware. No longer will Sorenson need to worry about maintaining on-premises servers or worry about the collapse of aging hardware and accompanying downtime. In the end and in the coming years, migrating to AWS will lead to lower maintenance costs for Sorenson allowing them to use their resources on developing advanced technology to further support their customers.

“Sorenson is not in the business of running a data center, but we are here to help connect and support the communication needs of the Deaf community,” said Cloes. “Cloud Architect Pat Reilly and the 1Strategy team provided us indispensable AWS guidance and expertise, jump starting us to leverage the powerful capabilities of AWS.”

About the Partner

1Strategy is an Amazon Partner Network (APN) Premier Consulting Partner, focusing exclusively on Amazon Web Services (AWS). 1Strategy helps businesses architect, migrate, and optimize their workloads on AWS, creating scalable, cost-effective, secure, and reliable solutions. 1Strategy also helps customers get real value from their data using comprehensive machine learning models and artificial intelligence. 1Strategy holds the AWS DevOps, Migration, Data & Analytics, Well Architected, and Machine Learning Competencies, and is a partner of the AWS Public Sector Program. 1Strategy was one of the initial ten AWS Partners globally who was qualified and authorized by AWS to conduct a Well-Architected Review and is among the top Well Architected partners in the AWS eco-system. With experts having deployed AWS solutions since 2007, 1Strategy is a leader in custom training—providing customers with the knowledge, tools, and best practices to manage those solutions over time. 1Strategy is a TEKsystems Global Services company with teams in Seattle and Salt Lake City, supporting customers throughout the US and across every vertical. 

Learn More

For more information about how 1Strategy can assist your company with migration to AWS, building artificial intelligence and machine learning solutions, optimizing data and analytics, or receiving custom training, visit 1Strategy.com or contact us at info@1Strategy.com.