Introduction

Success Resources has grown to become one of the leading global providers of educational resources, seminars and workshops.

Success Resources has a longstanding presence in the educational seminar sector, with over two decades of experience. The company has served as a source of inspiration to over 10 million individuals by featuring a diverse array of speakers from various corners of the globe.

Challenges

Success Resource's GCP environment presented a number of difficulties, including the need for compliance security improvements, effective resource monitoring and alerting, automated backups for Cloud SQL, and the avoidance of unplanned application outages brought on by package upgrades. In order to pinpoint areas for improvement across crucial pillars (security, operational excellence, reliability, performance efficiency, and cost optimization) Success Resources desired a comprehensive assessment of its infrastructure.

Searce Solution

Cost savings: We helped Success Resources save a remarkable 74% on their cloud computing costs by carefully analyzing their infrastructure, CPU and RAM usage, and usage patterns. The team of solvers at Searce developed a strategic plan that recommended purchasing Committed Use Discounts (CUDs). This resulted in a 74% monthly cost savings for 2022-2023 compared to 2021-2022.

Security: Our team helped them prevent potential OS-level security issues by regularly patching their system. This ensured that their business operations were uninterrupted and minimized risks. We successfully upgraded critical patches for their Managed Instance Group (MIG) workload without any downtime, which ensured smooth business continuity.

Business scaling assistance: We worked closely with the team at Success Resources to help them scale their business. We recommended the right virtual machines (VMs) and quickly managed the procurement process for their new setup, supporting their growth initiatives.

Cloud wellness checks: Using our in-house tool, Cloud Wellness Review, we provided Success Resources with a comprehensive view of their projects. These reports covered four essential pillars: security, operational excellence, performance excellence, and cost optimization. These insights helped them maintain robust security practices while ensuring their infrastructure can scale to support their business objectives.

Results

The collaborative efforts between and Searce resulted in significant improvements across multiple dimensions of Success Resource's GCP infrastructure:

• Enhanced Security and Compliance: We took actions to improve security for the production environment by mentioning correct CIDR and respective ports in the firewall. We also checked service accounts key to secure the production environment.
• Operational Efficiency: We set up the VM manager to automate the security updates in windows server and linux server in all projects.
• Data Integrity: We ensured automated backups for Cloud SQL databases to set up recovery plans every 6 hours.
• Reduced Downtime Risk: We also focused on the prevention of unexpected package upgrades through the OS Update Policy minimized the risk of application downtime due to unforeseen system changes.
• Informed Decision-Making: The Cloud Wellness Review reports provided actionable insights and recommendations for optimizing infrastructure across various dimensions, fostering better decision-making for future projects.
• Infrastructure Alerting and Monitoring: We created an alerting policy to monitor the existing resources. This will help to ensure that there will be no production downtime.