Mithi Software Technologies focuses on the development of software for the exchange, storage, and recovery of email. Since 2005, the company has been developing easy-to-use and simple-to-manage solutions to help workers communicate and collaborate more effectively. In 2015, Mithi Software launched Mithi SkyConnect, its first cloud-based email software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution. Since then, the company has developed other cloud-based services, including Vaultastic, which archives email; ClrStream, which provides email security and disaster recovery; and Ideolve, a cloud-based workspace for teams to collaborate on ideas and initiatives. Mithi Software is headquartered in Pune, India, and the company currently employs 50 people.
“With AWS, we are spending 80% of our time on software development instead of hardware troubleshooting.”
Sunil Uttam
Co-founder & Director of Services, Mithi Software Technologies
The Challenge
When Mithi Software Technologies started developing its first email solution, the software was deployed on-premises at customer data centers. “It was difficult for us to give all customers the same level of experience because of variations in the IT at client sites. Customers had different hardware, networks, IT policies, and internal skillsets. We spent up to 80 percent of our time resolving issues caused by infrastructure,” says Sunil Uttam, co-founder and director of services at Mithi Software Technologies. The time and resources that went into fixing these issues cut into the time the company could devote to innovation.
With the evolution of cloud-based IT, Mithi Software planned to re-engineer its email solution, transforming it to a SaaS solution under the brand name Mithi SkyConnect. “The cloud could help us overcome data center issues and deliver a uniform customer experience,” says Uttam. There were additional benefits to a cloud migration too. “We could direct more resources to software development and really improve our speed of innovation,” says Uttam. “We would no longer have to work with customers on infrastructure provisioning when it came to scaling their email solutions because they were running on an elastic cloud infrastructure. The whole cycle of IT procurement and deployment was avoided.”
Why Amazon Web Services
Mithi Software ran a proof of concept (POC) for its re-engineered email solution on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. It moved a small proportion of its 500,000 email accounts to the AWS Cloud and spent the next six months assessing and fine-tuning the POC infrastructure. Says Uttam, “We were impressed by the overall performance and reliability of the AWS Cloud. What’s more, the shared security model of AWS ensured that our infrastructure was protected from any kind of attack.”
During the six-month POC, Mithi worked regularly with AWS Solution Architects who answered questions and offered advice on improving the performance of the AWS Cloud. “The AWS Solution Architects are a core strength of AWS,” says Uttam. “They are very supportive and helped us get to a position where we were completely confident in migrating entirely to the AWS Cloud.”
Mithi Software, an Advanced Technology Partner in the AWS Partner Network (APN), uses a range of AWS offerings for its collaboration software. With Mithi SkyConnect, customer emails are scanned for viruses, ransomware, and other malware before passing through a gateway into the AWS Cloud. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances run the Mithi SkyConnect code, which runs jobs that include distributing emails across the two storage tiers.
Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) stores the most recent and frequently accessed emails while Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) holds emails, which are accessed infrequently. SkyConnect also use AWS Lambda (Lambda) and Amazon DynamoDB to provision and maintain customer account profiles and preferences. It uses Amazon API Gateway to pass messages between the two solutions and Amazon EC2 Container Services (Amazon ECS) along with Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) to queue and run large bulk jobs in the background for export of email as well as the import and migration of large volumes of email.
Today, Mithi Software also uses the AWS Cloud to run Vaultastic, an email archival solution that enables customers to automatically backup emails for compliance and search the stored messages. Vaultastic uses many of the same services as SkyConnect, including Amazon EC2, Amazon EBS, and Amazon S3. They ensure the email messages are stored securely while being easy to search at the same time.
The Benefits
With its email software running on the AWS Cloud, Mithi Software stays focused on innovation, not resolving hardware issues. “Every customer gets the same reliable level of high performance” says Uttam. “With AWS, we are spending 80 percent of our time on software development instead of allocating that same amount of time resolving hardware problems.” The pace of innovation has also noticeably improved. Thanks to the flexibility of the AWS Cloud, developers can spin up environments on demand to build and test code for new services. “With on-premises hardware, it could take up to 10 days to have a concept for a new service ready for my review,” says Uttam. “But by using AWS, a concept can be ready for me in a single day—that’s a 90 percent reduction.”
Mithi Software no longer has to work with customers on provisioning, managing, and scaling the on-premises infrastructure supporting the email services. “Data growth isn’t a problem for customers anymore,” says Uttam. “The data for our services is expanding by around three gigabytes per second. We have already accumulated more than 100 terabytes. The amount of data and the rate of growth aren’t a big concern, because we simply scale our AWS Cloud instead of adding capacity at each customer data center.”
One of Mithi Software’s customers is Mahindra and Mahindra Limited (M&M), a multinational automobile manufacturer in India that runs multiple applications on AWS after the adoption of Mithi SkyConnect. “We were greatly reassured by the fact that Mithi SkyConnect runs on AWS,” says Vijay Mahajan, vice president of IT at M&M. “AWS is one of the most reliable platforms available, and it enabled Mithi to meet all the service-level agreements they have with us.”
The success of Mithi SkyConnect, running on AWS, has led Mithi Software to release newer AWS-based SaaS solutions. These include Vaultastic, ClrStream, and Ideolve. “We are using the AWS Cloud as a foundation to develop our solution portfolio,” says Uttam. “In addition, we are using the AWS Cloud to build an international presence because the multiple AWS Regions around the world ensure that we can give customers the same high level of performance across different locations.”
