Platform
Tropical Smoothie Café (TSC) is a Florida founded fresh fruit smoothie and wholesome food purveyor boasting over 1,000 franchise locations across 45 states. TSC has been around since 1997 and has grown substantially over the last 5-10 years. With that growth came a need for more advanced and multifaceted infrastructure support. Lightedge has supported TSC since the falloff 2022.
“Our engagement with Lightedge began in September last year [2022]. We initially came to them primarily from a security perspective. We were looking at changing from our current managed security provider and consolidating additional services and support for an existing AWS environment,” said Daniel Herring, Director of Enterprise Systems and Data, for Tropical Smoothie Café.
Challenge
Most immediately, Lightedge provided the necessary support for TSC as they transitioned from a previous provider. Afterwards, Lightedge focused on support for their tech stack which is bifurcated between two buckets. The first focuses on the technology leveraged in TSC cafes such as POS and back-of-house systems. The other focuses on the TSC support center which includes all software, subscriptions, and infrastructure supporting their cafes. Recently, TSC has also launched their own mobile app, and its infrastructure is housed in AWS.
“Our information technology and security teams, like many businesses, is on the smaller side. This is primarily the reason we wanted to work with a partner, like Lightedge, that had a deep bench of AWS expertise and support. Had we not had Lightedge on hand to help w ith upgrades to prepare for our mobile app launch, we would have left the business open for things to go wrong and potentially cost us downtime,” said Herring.
Solution
Lightedge’s solution combines its comprehensive AWS managed services customized with specific focuses for TSC’s unique infrastructure. For example, TSC’s primary focuses are on storage (S3), compute (EC2 and EKS), and security (IAM).
TSC leverages of Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) for object storage through a web service interface, as well as S3 Glacier for data archiving and backup. For compute, TSC runs a mixture of standard EC2 instances and Elastic Kubernetes Services (EKS) for its mobile infrastructure. Finally, they leverage IAM to securely manage identities and access to AWS services and resources.
“Storage is a big deal because we’re ingesting the data for our data warehouse through AWS. In terms of security, the identity access management piece is great for managing the user base, leveraging security groups, and ensuring we’re following the latest best practices. We’ve also started running Lambdas for automation tasks. As we’ve upgraded infrastructures and manage very difficult and complex processes within AWS, having a partner like Lightedge to answer questions or provide hands-on assistance has saved us considerable time and effort,” said Herring.
Results
In the short time TSC has worked with Lightedge, we’ve already been able to point out a number of opportunities for improvement, particularly from a cost perspective. These opportunities have since saved TSC considerable AWS infrastructure costs.
“Lightedge has been able to succinctly provide a number of different reports which pointed out savings opportunities and the tasks we needed to execute in order to take advantage of those cost savings opportunities. On the security side, their cloud management platform, TRiA, offers compliance insight scores and based on its remediations, we’ve definitely seen the needle move in terms of greater compliance for things like CIS and PCI,” said Herring.
He continues, “In terms of responsiveness, Lightedge is able to identify, investigate, and remediate security issues very quickly. A lot of the services and tooling Lightedge provides, like the TRiA platform, have made it markedly easier for us to manage our AWS environment. I’ve also been very impressed by the amount of complimentary and self-service education opportunities AWS offers.”
About Tropical Smoothie Café
Tropical Smoothie Café opened its first franchise in Tallahassee, Florida in 1997. By 1999, it added a wide range of wholesome food options to its menu. One year later, the Tropical Smoothie Cafe name was officially established. Tropical Smoothies has always been guided by one simple belief: when you eat better, you feel better and when you feel better – all is better. Our mission is to inspire a healthier lifestyle by serving amazing food and smoothies with a bit of tropical fun.
Learn more at www.tropicalsmoothiecafe.com.