Case Studies

Riley + Compass Group: Reducing cost and improving database performance with AWS and Riley

Compass Group is a world leader in catering and support services, employing more than 500,000 people in 50 countries. Locally in Australia, Compass employs 10,000 people, working in more than 478 locations.

The major reasons Compass migrated

Compass originally had a large legacy estate at a data centre, that needed to be migrated to the cloud. A major reason for the move was the lack of agility, along with the fixed costs. Prior to migrating, Compass struggled to deliver systems to market in a timely manner, making it difficult to keep up with market pressure.

As Compass is a global company, there was a challenge around their security landscape and ensuring their environment was secure end to end. A challenge that was faced previously was their database queries, as these were taking approximately 2 hours, a solution to reduce this timeline was vital for their finance team.

Riley's solution

The team at Riley brought Compass into their next-generation managed services portfolio, allowing them access to the knowledge of Riley's experienced team. Riley was able to provide an environment within AWS that solved many of the issues for Compass, such as their lack of agility. This was solved by providing Compass with ‘golden images’ of their standard infrastructure requirements. This allows Compass to have servers created within 15 minutes, and due to the Riley managed services component, these servers are automatically added into the managed portfolio by utilising AWS Systems Manager.

Riley was able to bring down the query time for the Compass financial team, through the use of AWS RDS. Designed in a highly available manner, this allowed the finance team to run their queries and have results within 3 minutes.

Compass had major success with this cloud adoption

Firstly, utilising the AWS 'pay as you go' model along with Riley's cost optimisation framework, Compass was able to drastically reduce their month to month cost.

Compass also was able to remain competitive in bringing solutions to market by utilising the golden images built by Riley. This allowed them to have the agility to drastically reduce their time to market for these solutions.

Finally, the time saved for the finance team by reducing the running time of their database queries through the use of AWS RDS has allowed for better business outcomes overall.