About freeTV
freeTV is a multi-channel TV operator that offers over 62 linear channels, ground-breaking content and a vast VOD library, providing audiences in the Israel media market access to channels, catchup capabilities, movies, and series anytime, anywhere.
The Challenge
freeTV involves dozens of different technologies and applications that must be securely connected to the AWS Cloud.
The new freeTV infrastructure needed Backups to be stored in a separate AWS account for Disaster recovery and compliance.
freeTV needed Automat-it’s help to meet business and regulatory requirements by having visibility and control over backup environments.
This need is driven by the growing complexity of AWS environments, the proliferation of data across diverse AWS services and regions, and the increasing regulatory scrutiny on data protection practices. Without a centralized, automated solution to oversee backup policies, organizations risk exposing sensitive data, facing compliance violations, and losing critical information in the event of a disaster or ransomware attack.
Maintaining an up-to-date, compliant backup strategy is a best practice, and often a legal and fiduciary requirement for businesses operating in highly regulated industries such as healthcare, finance, and government.
The Solution
Automat-it’s role, as the DevOps partner focusing on security and compliance, was to apply the best practices for the multi-account AWS environment, including the backup of data from many different sources.
The FreeTV solution utilizes several Amazon Aurora MySQL-Compatible Edition and Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition regional clusters for persistent storage.
Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) is used to share data with multiple Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) workloads.
Continuous backup creation and copy to another AWS account were implemented using AWS Backup and organizational backup policies. Older backups are moved to cold storage.
The implemented solution continuously monitors, detects, and tracks policy drifts across backup deployments at scale.
During the build phase, Automat-it’s team deployed its solution of Automat-it AWS Landing Zone. Automat-it’s AWS Landing Zone provides you with a pre-configured solution, reducing time to implementation from weeks to just days. To ensure compliance with AWS Cloud Governance best practices, the AWS Control Tower was used to manage all of the AWS Accounts used in freeTV AWS Organizations.
AWS Backup Audit Manager was used across the member accounts in the freeTV organization, and its findings are summarized in Amazon QuickSight dashboards. An additional output from this solution is organization-wide compliance reports that can help freeTV demonstrate compliance with regulatory requirements.
Automat-it’s 24/7 support team also provides incident management services. The security, support, and DevOps teams continuously monitor the infrastructure, applications, and compliance.
On top of the above mentioned project, Automat-it is now monitoring ongoing service usage by the FinOps team. Performance and cost optimization are reviewed using FinOps best practices, leveraging the high growth forecast. This includes, among other things, private pricing agreements for specific services and the entire spend, saving plans, reserved instances, unutilized resource detection, and storage strategy.
The Results
- A scalable, highly available, secured, stable, and monitored multi-account environment with cost-effective centralized backup management
- Data backups are regularly created and copied to a separate AWS account, thereby improving security and reducing risks
- Using AWS Backup Audit Manager to automate detection of drifts in AWS Backup data protection policies, and provide organization-wide cross-account, cross-Region reporting
- AWS Backup Audit Manager has been deployed at scale and consumes freeTV organization’s compliance findings in Amazon Quicksight
- freeTV now benefits from monitoring its organization’s compliance data via interactive dashboards to enhance visibility and make more informed decisions about its AWS Backup environment
- 24/7 monitoring of alarms and a secured centralized log archive
- Ongoing management of cloud cost and performance