About Chesapeake Church

Chesapeake Church is a Non-Profit organization whose mission it is to reach unchurched people and help them grow into fully devoted followers of Jesus Christ. With the help of its members, Chesapeake Church strives to end hunger in Calvert County. Through their 12,000 sq/ft Warehouse, Chesapeake Church supplies food and other resources to partner feeding organizations throughout Southern Maryland, such as food pantries and HeartFelt Backpacks.

The space also houses their Culinary Training program and collaborative workspace for like-valued nonprofits. This free, eight-week program, prepares individuals to work in the restaurant industry. In addition to job-placement assistance, students receive help with budgeting and personal development. The program is specifically designed to serve individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities .

Since the pandemic began in March 2020, community volunteers have gathered weekly at the End Hunger Warehouse to pack and deliver Kids Kits, nutritious breakfasts, lunches and snacks, to over 1,300 students without consistent access to food.

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The Challenge

  • Chesapeake Church was looking to transform their organization’s IT Infrastructure by migrating to AWS for increased reliability and scalability. They initially ran on-premise servers in their 3 offices located in Maryland. These servers were disjointed, however, and each location had independent user authentication management solutions. Chesapeake Church was also in need of a centralized multimedia and document storage solution that was being hosted across several on-premise servers at the time and had no unified backup strategy.

The Solution

  • Cloudnexa decided to leverage Amazon WorkSpaces and EC2 instances to meet the computing needs of end-users.
  • Cloudnexa proposed using AWS Managed Microsoft Directory to centralize user management.
  • Amazon FSx was chosen as a Windows-Compatible, AWS managed, file storage solution.
  • A combination of Site-to-Site and Client VPN solutions, and Amazon WorkSpaces, were used to provide fine-grained access control to remote users.

Results

  • By re-platforming file storage and domain services roles on to fully managed AWS services, Chesapeake Church was able to rapidly deploy and test highly available infrastructure while minimizing administrative overhead.
  • Amazon WorkSpaces provided members of the accounting team always-on access to QuickBooks and other financial data.
  • VPN solutions were integrated with Active Directory to provide users with single sign-on access to Amazon FSx file storage.
  • Chesapeake Church was able to decommission on-premises servers and rely on Cloudnexa as their Managed Cloud Support provider to ensure uptime and availability of their AWS resources.

About Cloudnexa and AWS

Cloudnexa represents limitless potential with the power to transform small businesses into industry leaders and scale global organizations into agile innovators. At Cloudnexa, we help you harness that potential and leverage it to achieve any goal you can imagine. We engineer solutions for success on your terms.

Next steps

To learn more about how AWS and Cloudnexa can help your business, visit www.cloudnexa.com