Florida Retirement System Moves to AWS

SBA Saves $500,000

The Florida State Board of Administration (SBA) retirement portal (www.myfrs.com) has been hosted in an off-premises data center and is comprised of a web application framework using n-Tier Java and Aurora Database technologies that integrates with many other critical State of Florida systems. The portal provides resources to its members to manage funds in their Investment and Pension Plans. On an average, more than 200,000 users per month use the portal to manage their financial portfolio and is a go-to resource for many retirees and employees.

The SBA began looking for a strategic partner and a potential solution provider to lead a Cloud migration and to move from an on-premises hardware data center model to a modern Cloud infrastructure operating expense model. Tekstream was chosen as the digital transformation partner to lead the mission critical engagement.A key Division of the State of Florida government has a retirement portal to service over 1M+ currently employed and retired employees of the State Government. This portal solution has been hosted in an off-premises data center and is comprised of a scalable web application using n-Tier Java and Database technologies and integrating with many other State of Florida systems. With all hardware owned by the state, State of Florida was facing the regular yearly expenditures for support and hosting services as well as an upcoming, significant hardware replacement cost in their upcoming fiscal year. In their previous fiscal year, their on-premises hardware had 99.3% uptime and all unscheduled downtime were related to hardware issues. For these reasons, the State of Florida began looking for a Cloud migration path to move from an off-premises hardware data center model to a modern Cloud infrastructure operating expense model.

Tekstream was chosen as the digital transformation partner to lead the mission-critical engagement.

 

 

Technologies Involved

AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery Services (DRS)

AWS CloudWatch
AWS Transit Gateway
AWS VPN

AWS Advanced Tier Services

Key Pain Points

The State was facing regular, annual expenditures for hardware support and hosting services.

Managing the scalability and performance of the retirement portal, especially considering its high usage by over 200,000 users per month.

Their on-premises hardware had 99.3% uptime and all unscheduled downtime was related to hardware issues.

Solution Provided

TekStream assisted the State in determining the cost of migrating to the AWS Cloud platform to be significantly less than the cost of the upcoming hardware refresh, especially when factoring in the reduction in future operating costs. The Return on Investment (ROI) calculations also included key pieces of the infrastructure, such as migrating the Oracle Database supporting the portal application from the hosted model to the AWS managed services model, initially leveraging Amazon RDS for Oracle enables and subsequently leveraging Amazon Aurora for further cost savings related to the operating costs of managing an Oracle database including patching, optimization, and monitoring.

Key Successes

  • Phase I launch led to significant cost savings.
  • Avoided $250,000 hardware purchase.
  • AWS platform resulted in 50% cost reduction over 5 years for one application.

About The Florida State Board of Administration

Industry: State & Regional Agencies

Location: Tallahassee, Florida

The State Board of Administration (SBA) for the Florida government has a retirement portal that services over 1.5M+ current and retired employees.