July 2023
Clearlight Finds the Formula for Growth with Business Compass and AWS IQ
For more than 25 years, Clearlight infrared saunas have been a fixture in spas, health clubs, and private residences around the world. Clearlight's remote control mobile app for its Sanctuary line of full-spectrum infrared saunas is an important element of its customer experience. Maintaining the infrastructure required to support Clearlight's mobile app, however, had become a difficult and costly task. Clearlight needed a cost-effective approach to modernize its systems and pave the way for growth. With AWS IQ, Clearlight found the answer: teaming with AWS Partner Business Compass LLC and Amazon Web Services (AWS) to deploy a secure, resilient, and highly scalable cloud-based solution.
Technology Challenges Put a Leading Sauna Maker in the Hot Seat
Clearlight was quick to see the benefits of offering a mobile app for customers to activate and manage their saunas remotely. At the same time, Clearlight was learning just how hard it can be to keep up with the rapid pace of mobile technology innovation. The process of setting up Clearlight’s mobile app, for instance, required the use of a 2.4GHz Wi-Fi network connection—forcing customers with modern, 5GHz Wi-Fi networks to troubleshoot and work around the issue.
Clearlight also faced challenges with the servers and technology infrastructure it maintained to support its mobile app. Serving a global customer base meant running servers at three widely dispersed colocation sites, with downtime and reliability concerns, plus potential security issues. While Clearlight was eager to roll out new capabilities as part of a modernization strategy, scaling its current approach to support those plans wasn't in the cards.
AWS IQ really helped us build out our business. We were able to put our resources on projects and get them some experience.
Turning to the AWS Cloud for Security, Reliability, and Scalability
Clearlight recognized the cloud as a potential solution to its technology challenges. Using AWS IQ, it shared its requirements with potential cloud partners and connected with Business Compass LLC, an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner. Business Compass first secured Clearlight’s production infrastructure. By setting up an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud(Amazon EC2) bastion host instance, Clearlight gained access to its production servers through the bastion host, as well as security and Identity and Access Management (IAM) capabilities. “Anything we deploy, for any customer, we keep security top of mind,” stated Business Compass CEO Sribatsa Das. “It always has to be the first thing we think about.”
Anything we deploy, for any customer, we keep security top of mind.
With business continuity as another key priority, Business Compass set up an Amazon EC2 lifecycle policy that included nightly backups and a seven-day retention period. This gave Clearlight balanced and cost-effective disaster recovery capabilities. And for scalability, Business Compass used AWS CloudFormation templates to give Clearlight the ability to scale its server infrastructure effortlessly across additional AWS Regions.
A Partnership with Potential Looks Ahead
Most of the upgrades Business Compass recommended for Clearlight took just 10 days—a remarkable display of efficiency and responsiveness. With some additional planned development and upgrade work, Clearlight President Andy Kaps said he expected the company to flip the switch on its mobile app and infrastructure upgrades within a matter of weeks.
According to Kaps, Clearlight is already thinking about how to make the most of its new, cloud-enabled capabilities—and of its successful partnership with Business Compass and AWS. “The Business Compass team and AWS know what they’re doing, and of course that’s key,” Kaps observed. “But it was their responsiveness and their focus on solving our problems that really made the difference.”
The Business Compass team and AWS know what they’re doing, and of course that ’s key.
Business Compass LLC
