Customer
EMK Institute is an education and nonprofit organization with public-facing digital experiences. The Institute relies on technology to support its mission of civic engagement and public education through events, media, and online programming.
The Challenge
EMK Institute's on-premises environment was expensive and significantly underutilized, creating both cost and operational challenges:
- - 44 servers in scope for migration assessment
- - Only 6% average utilization across the existing server fleet
- - 91% of servers were not right-sized for their actual workloads
- - 15% of servers showed 0% utilization and were effectively idle
The legacy environment limited the Institute's ability to scale digital experiences, respond to traffic spikes, and invest in mission-critical initiatives rather than infrastructure maintenance.
The Solution
Tactical Edge partnered with EMK Institute to execute a full migration and selective modernization of their infrastructure on AWS.
Key components of the solution included:
- - AWS Directory Service, Amazon DocumentDB, S3, and EC2 for core infrastructure and identity management
- - Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL and DynamoDB for modernized database workloads
- - Amazon API Gateway, CloudFront, and Athena for scalable content delivery and analytics
- - AWS Backup and AWS Systems Manager for automated operations and disaster recovery
- - AWS Security Hub, AWS Budgets, and AWS Cost Explorer for security posture and cost governance
The migration was designed to right-size every workload, eliminate idle resources, and modernize key applications while maintaining continuity for the Institute's public-facing programs.
Results
The migration and modernization delivered significant improvements across cost, reliability, and scalability:
- - 82% estimated cost savings after right-sizing and eliminating underutilized infrastructure
- - Greater than 99.9% availability for the public-facing CMS and digital experience platform
- - Greater than 99.5% availability for internal applications and operational systems
EMK Institute now operates on a modern, cost-efficient AWS foundation that supports its mission-critical digital experiences with enterprise-grade reliability and room to grow.
Why It Matters
This engagement demonstrates a core Tactical Edge principle:
Cloud migration delivers the most value when it starts with honest assessment, right-sizes every workload, and modernizes selectively based on actual operational needs.
For EMK Institute, this meant dramatically lower costs, higher reliability, and the ability to focus resources on mission rather than infrastructure.
This engagement reflects Tactical Edge's broader approach: start from infrastructure realities, design migrations with right-sizing and governance built in, and focus on long-term cost efficiency and operational reliability.