Hosting Canto Cumulus in the Cloud

Most Canto Cumulus solutions are still hosted in-house for apparent reasons: better performance and tighter control over cost, data and infrastructure. However, a large corporate customer in the financial industry tasked Nextware to provide:

• 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

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

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 Web Client.

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

Below diagram illustrates our customer’s simplified system architecture:

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 us.