Navigating the Cloud: Essential Strategies for Successful Migration

Unlocking the Potential of Cloud Migration: A Comprehensive Guide

Seamless Transition: Best Practices for Migrating to the Cloud

The Advertising Council or more widely referred to as the Ad Council, is a preeminent non-profit organization that works with partners to promote social causes. With a history of more than 80 years, they are one of most recognised brands in US. They produce, distribute, and promote public service announcements on behalf of sponsors’ donated media assets. Ad Council’s campaigns are distributed thru a network of media outlets like TV broadcast, print, outdoor (i.e., billboards, bus stops), and Internet.

Ad Council’s objective is to inspire action, create impact, bring about positive change and improve lives. A critical component of each campaign is evaluation of a campaign’s effectiveness. Rigorous research goes into assessing each campaign’s effectiveness through a dashboard of indicators around exposure, awareness, engagement, and impact.

Understanding Cloud Migration: Benefits and Key Considerations

Overcoming Challenges: Common Hurdles in Cloud Migration

All campaign assets are monitored using the latest, cutting-edge tools to track media out-reach, placement, impressions, and coverage.

Planning Your Cloud Journey: Essential Steps for a Successful Migration

Ensuring Success: Tips and Best Practices for Cloud Migration

Thru continuous tracking of a campaign’s media assets like websites, social media or other digital properties and point-in-time surveys, a campaign’s awareness among its target audience, changes in attitude & behaviour is assessed.

Assessing Your Readiness for Cloud Migration: Key Factors to Consider

Choosing the Right Cloud Platform: Comparing Options and Selecting the Best Fit

For a campaign to be deemed success, it’s equally important to supplement in-house data trends with external data sources from other agencies or sponsors.

Mitigating Risks: Strategies for Minimizing Disruption During Migration

Post-Migration Optimization: Maximizing the Value of Your Cloud Infrastructure

Given the nature of operations and priorities, Ad Council is a lean organization. With their limited means, they are unable to dedicate resources to own, support & maintain expensive hardware.

The emergence of cloud as a reliable and trusted service offering opened a new avenue for Ad Council. With ANSI SQL literate data analysts and easy integration to existing systems and applications, our client opted for Microsoft’s SQL Server hosted on AWS EC2, a fully managed platform service (PaaS) from Amazon Web Services.

This solution had various benefits that not only eliminated the need for upfront costs, with a pay as you go/use model, the costs were always easy to manage.

How this helped Ad Council

• removed the drudgery of time-consuming administrative tasks without having to provision infrastructure or even maintain software. consistent and reliable performance.
• consistent and reliable performance. 
• scalable compute at the click of a button with zero downline.
• high availability with near zero downtime. Backups were managed by AWS.
• best in industry security for data using AWS Key Management Service.

AWS EC2 helped Ad Council pivot from routine, time consuming and resource intensive administrative tasks to managing campaigns effectively.

While this solution was effective for Ad Council, as data volumes increased the need for additional storage couldn’t be effectively catered to while using AWS EC2. Additional costs could no longer be absorbed. Also with newer data sources, the analytics team concluded the existing infrastructure was no longer able to sufficient and had reached a point of diminishing returns.

USEReady’s consultants were tasked to help identify a scalable, future proof & easy to administer data platform that could meet Ad Council’s requirements. The need for a modern cloud-based data platform that could handle scale and complexity of current and future data feeds.

A detailed and comprehensive study of the available options helped shortlist Snowflake – a cloud native data platform. Below is a quick comparison of features between the two systems.

Further, USEReady’s consultants reviewed the choice of Snowflake for specific use cases at The Ad Council.

This validated the earlier studies and confirmed the choice of migration to Snowflake would immensely benefit The Ad Council. Further, this migration would also help save significantly in terms of licensing costs and on-going expenses as illustrated below.

Next in Series – How the migration to Snowflake helped The Ad Council modernize it’s data stack.