The M&C Saatchi Group are a leading digital agency, but with limited experience in data handling, scaling, security and cost optimisation.

Their team of data scientists needed to harness the power of data and analytical services within Amazon Web Services, in order to better understand the needs of their own clients.

They also needed a Managed Service Provider (MSP) that could not only design, build and implement an AWS, but provide ongoing support and application services.

The M&C Saatchi Group were looking to partner with an AWS specialist who could provide useful insights and a workable solution to their own data needs.

As a specialist with both AWS infrastructures and data and analytical integration, Firemind was the smartest choice for this intricate project partnership.

This specialist skillset, coupled with our experience as an MSP, ensured the project would be supported and scaled over time.

Our solution was to build an extract, transform and load (ETL) system that could copy data from one or more sources into a destination system, within AWS cloud.

This cascaded into building an Amazon Redshift data warehouse that could scale, depending on the data being interpreted. Redshift meant gaining up to 3x better price performance than any other cloud data warehouse, with automated improvements to enhance speed.

AWS Fargate was also adopted within this solution, providing a pay-as-you-go compute engine that let M&C Saatchi focus on building applications without managing servers. Fargate was compatible with both Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS).

As part of our ongoing managed services, Firemind can ensure cloud processes and services in use are used optimally and at the minimal cost available. Our monthly updates and ongoing support also provide peace of mind and collaborative information to the M&C Saatchi data team.

Cloud costs were originally managed incorrectly, leading to inflated monthly billings with unnecessary cloud spend. Our solution removed those barriers.

Data streams had lacked appropriate processing power without a business intelligence platform to handle the requests. Our integration of serverless, event-driven workflows using AWS Lambda, enabled 7x faster speeds.

Whilst data was secured privately, it did not reach certain levels of data compliance and ISO standards. Our solution to a greater increase in security, GDPR and ISO 27001 compliance with little ongoing effort needed from the client’s team moving forward.