Case Study: INSA

A person with tattooed arms and a black hat reaches out to cultivate a small marijuana plant.

Customer Profile

INSA is a Massachusetts-based medical marijuana company that serves both medical patients and recreational patrons. The company first opened their doors to the public as a medical-only cultivation, production, and retail facility in 2018. Since that day, they have grown and expanded as a multi-state operator.  They are one of the fastest growing privately owned cannabis companies on the East Coast with profitable operations in MA, PA , FL, and soon to be OH and CT. See: https://insa.com/about/

The Opportunity

INSA had originally planned to self-host a Sage X3 solution, but they were growing quickly, with ambitious plans to expand to other geographies and had limited IT resources. INSA engaged Cascadeo, an AWS Premier Consulting Partner and Managed Services Partner to develop a strategy to implement the Sage X3 solution to a public-cloud infrastructure that would allow INSA to better meet business requirements and rapidly growing expectations. 

The Partner

Cascadeo is a cloud DevOps and Managed Services engineering firm focused on mid-market to enterprise customers that require high levels of availability, performance, security, and scalability. We specialize in environments that require multi-technology dependencies, hybrid cloud solutions and connectivity, complex operational requirements, infrastructure automation, self-healing capabilities, predictive analytics and continuous deployments.

The Solution

  • Cascadeo Professional Services—architected and developed scripted deployment of a Well-Architected hosting solution in AWS including: 
    • Multi-Account AWS Environment using AWS Organizations, deployed and administered via AWS Control Tower;
    • VPC with Public/Private subnetting; 
    • EC2 Instances running Microsoft Windows and Microsoft SQL Server;
    • setup of VPN access to INSA’s’ corporate network; 
    • automation to perform regular backups (Windows OS and SQL Server);
    • ability to stop/restart UAT instances/environments when not in use. 
  • Cascadeo AI—an AIOps powered Cloud Management Platform (CMP) for monitoring/alerting of their AWS environment, including advanced support for Microsoft Windows and Microsoft SQL Server.
  • Cascadeo Managed Services—following the implementation, INSA engaged Cascadeo to provide ongoing Managed Services for their cloud-based platform, including:
    • 24x7x365 incident response; 
    • Issue remediation;
    • Operational tasks (e.g. OS patching, password rotation);
    • Quarterly Well Architected Reviews;
    • Microsoft SQL Server performance analysis/tuning and support;
    • Runbook/recipe development and maintenance; 
    • DRBC planning, testing and execution.

AWS Services Used

  • AWS Control Tower
  • AWS Organizations
  • Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)—Windows
  • Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)—Windows + SQL Server
  • Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)
  • Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
  • AWS Route53
  • Internet Gateway
  • Remote Desktop Gateway
  • NAT Gateway
  • AWS Single Sign-on
  • AWS Backup
  • Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)
  • Elastic Load Balancer (ELB)
  • AWS Lambda
  • Amazon CloudWatch
  • AWS CloudTrail

Benefits

INSA now has a single provider for all AWS hosting and support needs, providing secure, cost-effective performance and reliability at a lower cost and burden on IT than other self-hosted solutions.

Cascadeo’s rapid assessment and deployment of an AWS hosted solution allowed INSA and NexTec to deploy and configure their critical ERP solution within aggressive timeframe.

Cascadeo’s Managed Services team has reduced the operational burden placed on INSA’s  IT and Application teams, allowing them to focus on growing and enhancing their ERP solution capabilities. 

How We Won

Cascadeo was able to quickly demonstrate a deep knowledge of AWS infrastructure running Microsoft Windows and MS SQL Server workloads necessary to meet immediate, short-term needs and to provide long-term, strategic guidance.

About Cascadeo

Cascadeo is a Managed Services and Professional Services company devoted to fostering customer innovation. The Cascadeo philosophy is rooted in ethical engineering practices.

For us, this means listening carefully to client needs and creating individualized, purpose-driven solutions that are functionally effective, cost efficient, and meet the highest stakeholder expectations.

We custom build your initiative at every stage, from defining your cloud strategy through the design, build, automation, and management of your Cloud deployment.

Headquartered in Seattle, Washington and Manila, Philippines, Cascadeo is a division of Globe Telecom.  See: https://www.cascadeo.com/