Managed AWS Operations for a Leading Croatian Parking Operator

Managed AWS Operations for a Leading Croatian Parking Operator

Sedmi Odjel Delivers End-to-End Cloud Migration and Managed Operations for a Major Parking Platform on AWS.

Intro

One of Croatia's largest parking operators ran its platform on aging on-premises infrastructure that struggled to meet the availability and response time demands of a modern, real-time parking service. Sedmi Odjel first led a full migration of the operator's workloads from on-premises to AWS, then transitioned seamlessly into a managed services engagement providing 24x7 monitoring, incident management, and proactive operations. The result: a stable, cloud-native platform with fast incident response times and the operational maturity to support continued business growth.

About the Customer

The customer is one of Croatia's largest parking operators, managing parking facilities across multiple locations and serving both individual drivers and corporate clients. Their platform handles real-time parking availability, reservations, and payment processing - services where downtime or slow response directly impacts both revenue and driver experience. As the business expanded its digital footprint, the limitations of on-premises infrastructure became an increasingly critical constraint on reliability, scalability, and operational efficiency.

The Problem

The operator's on-premises infrastructure had served the business in its early stages but was no longer fit for purpose as a growing, digitally-driven parking platform:

• Aging Infrastructure: On-premises servers required significant capital investment to maintain and upgrade, with hardware refresh cycles creating periods of elevated operational risk.
• Limited Resilience: No cloud-native redundancy or failover capabilities meant that hardware failures translated directly into service outages affecting parking availability and payment processing.
• Slow Incident Response: Without dedicated monitoring or 24x7 operations coverage, infrastructure problems were discovered reactively - often by customers before engineers - leading to delayed resolution and reputational impact.
• No Scalability: Traffic spikes driven by events, seasonal demand, or new location launches could not be absorbed elastically, resulting in degraded performance at peak moments.
• Operational Burden: Internal teams were diverted to infrastructure maintenance rather than product development and business growth, limiting the company's ability to innovate.
• No DR Strategy: The absence of a validated disaster recovery plan exposed the business to extended recovery times and potential data loss in the event of a critical failure.

Why AWS Cloud?

AWS emerged as the ideal destination for the migration and ongoing operations for several reasons:

• Elastic Compute: AWS Auto Scaling enables the platform to absorb demand spikes from events and peak periods without permanent over-provisioning, aligning costs with actual usage.
• High Availability: AWS multi-AZ architectures provide the redundancy and failover capabilities that on-premises infrastructure could not deliver, directly addressing the customer's core reliability requirement.
• Managed Services: The breadth of AWS managed services - RDS, CloudFront, CloudWatch, and others - reduces operational complexity and enables consistent, automated operations without large internal teams.
• Security: AWS security tooling supports the access governance and compliance requirements appropriate for a platform handling payment transactions and sensitive customer data.
• Migration Support: AWS Migration and Modernization programs, combined with Sedmi Odjel's MAP-certified migration expertise, provided a structured, low-risk path from on-premises to cloud.

Solution

Following a successful migration cutover, Sedmi Odjel transitioned into a full managed services engagement covering:

• Monitoring & Alerting: 24x7 Amazon CloudWatch monitoring across all platform components with alerting tuned for fast anomaly detection and incident notification.
• 24x7 Incident Management: Round-the-clock incident detection and resolution with defined SLAs, ensuring fast response times for any platform degradation - the core operational requirement driving the engagement.
• Capacity Planning: Proactive workload analysis and resource forecasting, scaling infrastructure ahead of known demand peaks such as large events or new location launches.
• Operations & Change Management: Structured resource management and formal change process for configuration updates, installations, and system parameter changes - maintaining platform stability across all modifications.
• User and Access Management: Centralized identity governance including user provisioning/de-provisioning, MFA enforcement, and least-privilege access controls.
• Patch & Vulnerability Management: Regular OS and database patching with security prioritization, plus scheduled vulnerability scanning with remediation reporting.
• Backup, Restore & Disaster Recovery: Full backup implementation with periodic restore testing and a validated DR strategy with defined RTO/RPO targets for production workloads.
• Cost Management: Continuous spend monitoring, right-sizing recommendations, and cost-control implementation across the migrated environment.
• DevOps & Infrastructure: Maintenance of CI/CD pipelines, Kubernetes/container environments, and Infrastructure as Code configurations.
• Automation Support: Implementation of operational automation to reduce manual toil and improve consistency across routine tasks.
• Reporting & Governance: Monthly operational reports, AWS Well-Architected Reviews, and security audit cycles providing full visibility into platform health.

Results and Benefits

Migration Success: Full on-premises to AWS migration completed with zero data loss and minimal business disruption, establishing a cloud-native foundation for ongoing operations.

Incident Response: Mean time to detection reduced to under 5 minutes via automated alerting; mean time to resolution improved by 65% compared to the on-premises baseline, directly fulfilling the customer's core requirement for fast problem response.

Platform Availability: 99.9%+ uptime achieved post-migration, with unplanned outages reduced by over 70% compared to the on-premises period.

Scalability: Platform successfully absorbed traffic spikes from high-demand events and new location launches without degradation - a capability that was not possible on the previous infrastructure.

Security Posture: Full patch compliance achieved and maintained; MFA enforced across all AWS accounts; DR strategy validated through quarterly restore tests.

Cost Efficiency: Cloud economics replaced unpredictable capital expenditure cycles with predictable operational costs; AWS spend optimization delivered an estimated 18% reduction in infrastructure costs compared to equivalent on-premises running costs.

Operational Continuity: The seamless transition from migration partner to managed operations partner provided the customer with continuity of institutional knowledge, eliminating the ramp-up cost of onboarding a new operations provider.

Next Steps

With a stable, cloud-native platform under professional management, the operator is well positioned to expand its digital parking services, onboard new locations, and explore further automation of parking operations on AWS. Sedmi Odjel continues to partner with the customer as their trusted cloud operations provider, ensuring fast, reliable, and secure infrastructure for every driver, every transaction, and every location.

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