DOT Fasteners AWS Management Case Study

Morito Scovill Americas, based in the USA, manufactures products used by a variety of industries. You’ll find our snaps, fasteners, and grommets on a variety of applications such as clothing, footwear, fashion accessories, medical devices, boating products, football helmets, and military equipment. Our DOT® product line was introduced more than 100 years ago and our company has experience and heritage that goes back more than 200 years.

“We were experiencing increased labor costs in maintaining performance and security until the JetRails team migrated us to AWS. With their help, we've spent 75% less time on security concerns and have seen an average of 47% page load time improvement. We're also better positioned for future growth thanks to the flexibility of AWS.”

Chad Henry, System Administrator, DOTFasteners.com

Challenge

The DOT® Fasteners migration to Magento 2 came with system requirements that were not well suited for the cPanel servers of their original web host, which led to struggles to operate effectively. They initially migrated to an MGT-Commerce AWS environment, but the Magento site was then being hosted on a single EC2 node with MySQL, Redis, and Elasticsearch instead of utilizing more performant purpose-built AWS services and best practices. They also faced challenges regarding the costs of effective security in order to stay PCI Compliant.

JetRails Action Plan

JetRails architected an AWS solution with best practices in mind using the right AWS services for different concerns. This includes MySQL being offloaded to RDS Aurora, Redis migrated to Elasticache, and Elasticsearch offloading onto AWS OpenSearch. All EC2 instances, as well as services, are running on the Graviton family of processors for improved efficiency, leading to lower costs and resource usage. We were able to achieve 14.68% in savings overall for static assets, while certain services, like EC2, realized a cost reduction of over 20%. Splitting off workloads into services also allowed us to rightsize the account to utilize smaller EC2 instances, leading to a better-performing platform for their Magento 2 site.

JetRails also deployed a range of security solutions to assist DOT® Fasteners in adhering to PCI Compliance and security best practices. These solutions include the use of Cloudflare’s web application firewall (WAF) and bot mitigation, as well as Sansec’s eComScan malware scanner. This is in addition to JetRails security hardening of the environment and following least-privileged-access principles.

Results

On average, DOT® Fasteners has experienced a 47% improvement in page load times. They’ve spent approximately 75% less time on security concerns thanks to JetRails Cloudflare configuration and the AWS EC2 security groups. In addition, they’re benefiting from significant improvements in system architecture flexibility thanks to the new AWS environment. They also now have the ability to seamlessly upscale or downscale their dedicated AWS environment as needed to optimize costs and maintain improved performance.