Punta Gorda Airport Protects Critical Data During Hurricane
By OptimumTech January 9, 2024
Move Faster. Scale Smarter. Compete Better.
Background
Punta Gorda Airport (PGD) is a commercial and general aviation airport located near Punta Gorda, Florida. Owned and operated by the Charlotte County Airport Authority, PGD is an important transportation and economic asset for the region, providing hundreds of on-site jobs, space for business and aviation tenants, and more than $1.7 billion in total economic output.
Challenge
The Punta Gorda Airport is a small but busy airport in Southwest Florida, near the city of Punta Gorda. Every day, 73 commercial and general aviation flights depart from the airport’s three runways for destinations across the US.
The airport’s two-person IT team manages a group of mission-critical workloads, including a finance system, a security application that controls all access doors, and a parking application. Because of the importance of these applications, the IT team needs to reliably back up application data daily. Tim Montoya, manager of IT services at the Punta Gorda Airport, says, “We process parking payments on the parking system server, and we could lose revenue every day if that server went down. We had a legacy on-premises IT environment, and we wanted to find a better, more efficient way to do database backups.”
The airport was also interested in moving its application servers to AWS because it relied on an aging on-premises platform.
”We demonstrated that even if all our systems went down, we could still have all the data in the cloud and be ready to go right away. Tim Montoya Manager of IT Services
Solution
PGD addressed its requirements by engaging OptimumTech, an AWS Partner and AWS Global Security & Compliance Acceleration Program Partner, to discuss migrating its on-premises servers to Amazon Web Services (AWS). During initial conversations, OptimumTech suggested that the airport build a disaster recovery (DR) solution on AWS before conducting a full migration to the cloud. “We felt it made sense for the airport to prove to its leadership that it could run their mission-critical workloads in the cloud before doing a complete migration,” says Eric Sanders.
OptimumTech conducted a proof of concept (POC) that started with moving servers to AWS Control Tower. Next, eCloud set up a multi- Availability Zone deployment using AWS CloudFormation templates, in addition to review, analysis, and recommendations for PGD’s reference architectures on AWS. In the next phases of the POC, OptimumTech deployed defined critical workloads and resources into a target DR region on AWS and implemented security and networking capabilities to enable DR failover. OptimumTech then used AWS CloudFormation to templatize environments for future builds and migrate some servers to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS).
As PGD began testing its new AWS DR solution, Hurricane Ian, a Category 4 storm, grew larger and began approaching the city. “The hurricane was bearing down right on Punta Gorda, so we called the airport to tell the IT team that we can replicate everything in their environment, which we realized was beyond the POC,” says Sanders. “However, we knew it was the right thing to do because the airport’s system still needed to be up and running if the storm knocked out power.”
PGD never had to failover to AWS at any point during the event. “That was probably one of the biggest selling points to our leadership because we proved we could fully recover everything in a disaster situation,” says Montoya. “We demonstrated that even if all our systems went down, we could still have all the data in the cloud and be ready to go right away.”
Click the button below to view the results of this project.