Client evaluated their infrastructure before moving to cloud and found they had a serious drawback: agents, which introduced the following complications:

1. Installing (and eventually uninstalling) the agents created a lot of additional overhead.
2. Installing agents on their systems introduced security concerns, namely opening ports for agents in the firewall.
3. Deep application knowledge would be required for each system.
4. Addition of the agents created more potential points of failure, and more issues to troubleshoot.
5. No automation to include specific AWS configuration options for the cloud workload.
   

Ribus SMEs met with client at AWS re:Invent in 2016, and after some initial conversations they were very intrigued with some of Ribus’s core capabilities. Given the challenges they knew they’d face with solutions that relied on agents, a number of Ribus’s unique capabilities stood out as being very attractive:

Agentless – Eliminated many of their concerns with the tools they had previously evaluated.
Test in cloud – Offers two unique options for pre-migration testing. We can provision a thin clone of an on-prem workload in the cloud within minutes’ time without disrupting the running workload or its data, while keeping data in isolation (then delete the thin clone when done). Or, alternatively, simply run workloads directly in the cloud as-is and see how they perform. Then return them to on-prem when testing is concluded.
Streaming migration – Because Ribus decouples compute from storage, Client could run workloads from on-prem in the cloud within minutes. The migration of all remaining data to native cloud storage occurs in the background. Detaching entirely from on-prem when data migration is completed with just a few clicks. Any data changes made in the cloud (during the data migration) are still synced with on-prem storage in the meantime so there is zero data loss at cutover.
Physical servers – Support for migrating physical servers to the cloud while preserving the agentless and streaming properties of the solution.
Safety net – The ability to rollback to on-premises in the unlikely event that something isn’t working in the cloud as planned.

Hosted internally, the new AIFS website was successfully launched in mid 2015, the new distribution now implemented across their network of sites including the Australian Gambling Research Centre, Child Family Community Australia and numerous other sites that cater to separate projects of the Institute.