Hosting Canto Cumulus in the Cloud

Most Canto Cumulus solutions are still hosted in-house for apparent reasons: better performance, tighter control over cost, data and infrastructure and simply the fact that Cumulus - by design - is not a cloud solution. However, in 2013, a large corporate customer in the financial industry tasked Nextware with providing:

·       a hosted and easily scalable DAM solution,

·       based on Canto Cumulus,

·       divided into database, asset and web servers for better load-balancing and security,

·       with extremely stringent security, testing and backup requirements,

·       without any customer-side server IT support nor maintenance,

·       to end users within and outside the organization,

·       with zero customer-side footprint,

·       and world-wide web-based access.

These requirements meant a new road traveled, away from typical Canto Cumulus installations. The logical choice was using Amazon Web Services (AWS), in particular the following services:

 

·       Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2): resizable compute capacity in the cloud,

·       Elastic Block Storage (EBS): persistent block storage for use with EC2 instances,

·       Virtual Private Cloud (VPC):  isolated, virtual networking environment, including private and public subnets,

·       Simple Storage Service (S3): scalable, inexpensive backup storage,

·       and Route 53: cloud domain name service

 

Working with a project team based in Canada, the United States, India and Europe, Nextware fulfilled all these requirements. Six months later, after rigorous testing, our customer is now running a web-based DAM solution accessible only via secured ports 443 (HTTPS) and 22 (SFTP) with zero footprint on the customer side. Nextware maintains this solution 24/7 and provides technical support to all system users.

With this solution, the customer as well as external users – all controlled via Active Directory - can upload assets in batch via FTP. Server-side, Canto RoboFlow picks up new files, catalogs them and reflects the folder structure in their category tree. They can access their catalogs and records via Cumulus Sites and Web Client. Web Client is used to categorize and tag assets, whereas Sites is used to find and download assets.

If necessary, customer-side admins can still use the Cumulus rich client within a locked-down remote desktop session. Nextware Professional Services realized such access through Remote Desktop Web Access and Remote Desktop Gateway Server.

Below diagram illustrates our highly simplified system architecture. all proprietary details have been removed.

  

If you are planning to migrate your existing DAM solution to the cloud or if you are interested in setting up a new, cloud-based DAM solution, get in touch with Nextware Professional Services at contact@nextwaretech.com today.