Tamkeen, a government agency tasked with developing Bahrain’s private sector and positioning it as a driver of economic growth, launched a Business Continuity Support Programme to help minimise the pandemic’s impact on businesses. The initiative, which received more than 17,000 applications, was a major component of the economic stimulus packages announced by the Government of Bahrain early in 2020.
The Labor Fund or Tamkeen (an Arabic term that means empowerment) is a public authority established as one of the cornerstones of Bahrain’s national reform initiatives and Bahrain’s Economic Vision 2030 to support the private sector and reinforce its role as key player in the national development.
Solution Offered:
After conducting requirement gathering sessions and workshops with Tamkeen IT team. Beyon Solutions team collected below information from customer:
Tamkeen required to move following mentioned Applications and Database to AWS Cloud:
- Tamkeen Corporate Website
- Discover Life After School Application
- Bahrain Award Entrepreneurship Application
- Mashroo3i Youth Business Award
- IT Service Management System
Beyon Solutions offered below solution as per AWS best practices to Tamkeen and migrated Application and Database with minimal disruption of services to AWS Cloud:
Tamkeen’s different websites application servers and its databases will run on a single availability zone behind the load balancer with Auto scaling group. The Auto scaling group will be set to a minimum of one instance and in case of traffic increase another instance will be launched in another AZ, therefore by having this setup the proposed solution will be highly available and fault tolerant using CloudWatch and cloud trail for monitoring. An EC2 instance will be used to provision another domain controller on Tamkeen network. This domain controller will work as an additional domain controller for the existing domain controller for Tamkeen on-premises datacenter. This approach provides high availability and low latency solutions for low cost.
The solution proposed for File Server in AWS is by using AWS storage gateway. Within the solution AWS storage gateway appliance will be setup and integrated. Appliance will be setup with upload buffer and cache storage and then to write data on AWS storage gateway.
AWS Services Used: EC2 – RDS – AWS Storage Gateway – AWS CloudWatch – AWS CloudTrail
Challenges:
Tamkeen IT team asked, Beyon Solutions team about how to migrate their on-premises Active Directory (AD) domain to AWS so they can be free of the operational management of their AD infrastructure. Tamkeen team were unsure how to make the migration easy. A common approach using the CSVDE utility doesn’t migrate attributes such as user passwords. This makes migration difficult and necessitates manual effort for a large part of the migration that can cause operational and security challenges when migrating to a new directory.
Beyon Solutions team used the Active Directory Migration Toolkit (ADMT) along with the Password Export Service (PES) to migrate self-managed AD to AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory, also known as AWS Managed Microsoft AD. This enabled Beyon Solutions team to migrate AD objects and encrypted passwords for Tamkeen more easily.
Benefits:
After Successfully migrated Tamkeen Application and Database to AWS Cloud. Beyon Solutions received below feedback from IT team:
After moving to AWS, our business Application can scale up or scale down our operation and storage needs quickly to suit our situation, allowing flexibility as our needs change. Rather than purchasing and installing expensive upgrades ourselves, our cloud service provider handle this for us.
By moving to AWS, they cut hosting costs by 50%.
Beyon Solutions is a leading Cloud & Managed Service Provider, Based in the Kingdom of Bahrain, Beyon Solutions is an Advanced Consulting Partner since 2016 and part of the following programs (Solutions provider – AWS marketplace skilled consulting partner – AWS direct connect delivery partner ) with a goal to keep supporting our customers in the growth of their business through innovative solutions, providing superior customer experience, creating long-lasting partnerships
