Case Study: CannaCraft

Cascadeo’s rapid assessment and deployment of an AWS hosted solution allows CannaCraft to migrate, with minimal disruption to their internal users.
A pair of hands holding a plant.

About CannaCraft

CannaCraft is a vertically-integrated organization, founded in 2014 with the mission to produce safe and effective cannabis products. The company currently manufactures and distributes AbsoluteXtracts, Care By Design, Care By Design Hemp, Lagunitas Hi-Fi Hops, Farmer & The Felon, Satori, and Loud + Clear from their licensed facilities in Santa Rosa, California. CannaCraft’s product portfolio boasts hundreds of products, in unique applications including vape cartridges, drops, topicals, gel capsules, packaged flower, infused chocolates and gummies, and more. For more information about CannaCraft, please visit www.cannacraft.com.

The Opportunity

CannaCraft was introduced to Cascadeo by NexTec Group, a leading business-technology consulting firm, to help evaluate CannaCraft’s hosting options for their Sage X3 (ERP) solution.  CannaCraft’s existing hosting provider was inflexible, provided poor performance, slow customer service and was too expensive.CannaCraft engaged Cascadeo, an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner and Managed Services Partner to develop a strategy for migrating the Sage X3 solution to a public-cloud infrastructure that would allow CannaCraft to better meet business requirements and expectations.

The Partner

Cascadeo is a cloud DevOps and Managed Services engineering firm focused on mid-market to enterprise customers that require high levels of availability, performance, security, and scalability. We specialize in environments that require multi-technology dependencies, hybrid cloud solutions and connectivity, complex operational requirements, infrastructure automation, self-healing capabilities, predictive analytics and continuous deployments.

The Solution

  • Cascadeo Professional Services – architected and developed scripted deployment of a Well-Architected hosting solution in AWS – including:
    • Setup of VPN access to CannaCraft’s corporate network;
    • Automation to perform regular backups (Windows OS and SQL Server);
    • Ability to stop/restart UAT instances/environments when not in use.
  • cascadeo.io – an AIOps powered Cloud Management Platform (CMP) for monitoring/alerting of their AWS environment – including support for Microsoft Windows and Microsoft SQL Server.
  • Cascadeo Managed Services – following the migration, CannaCraft engaged Cascadeo to provide ongoing Managed Services for their cloud-based platform – including:
    • 24x7x365 incident response;
    • Issue remediation;
    • Operational tasks (e.g. OS patching);
    • Microsoft SQL Server performance analysis/tuning and support;
    • Runbook/recipe development and maintenance;
    • DRBC planning and execution.

AWS Services Used

  • Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) – Windows
  • Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) – Windows + SQL Server
  • Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)
  • Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
  • AWS Route53
  • Internet Gateway
  • Remote Desktop Gateway
  • NAT Gateway
  • AWS Site-to-Site VPN
  • AWS Single Sign-on
  • AWS Backup
  • Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)
  • Elastic Load Balancer (ELB)
  • AWS Lambda
  • Amazon CloudWatch
  • AWS CloudTrail

Benefits

CannaCraft now has a single provider for all AWS hosting and support needs, providing better performance and reliability at a lower cost than their previous solution.

Cascadeo’s rapid assessment and deployment of an AWS hosted solution allowed CannaCraft to migrate from their existing provider quickly, with minimal disruption to their internal users.

Cascadeo’s Managed Services team has reduced the operational burden placed on CannaCraft’s  IT and Application teams – allowing them to focus on growing and enhancing their ERP solution capabilities.

How We Won

Cascadeo was able to quickly demonstrate a deep knowledge of AWS infrastructure running Microsoft Windows and MS SQL Server workloads – necessary to meet immediate, short-term needs and to provide long-term, strategic guidance.

About NexTec Group

NexTec Group is a national consulting firm specializing in industry-specific technology to help you manage your business. This includes Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Business Intelligence (BI), Cloud and On-premise solutions for mid-sized businesses. We started the company because, as consultants, we worked with software sellers that had never walked a mile in their customers’ shoes. We had, and knew that we could offer something different: a company made up of consultants that had experience working in the industries that we were now advising. In the 25+ years that NexTec has been in business, we’ve developed close working relationships with our customers, partners and each other. We are proud of our 95% customer retention rate. See: https://www.nextecgroup.com/

Get in touch to learn how Cascadeo’s managed services can streamline your operations.