Namirial Boosts Performance and Compliance with AWS

Namirial is a key player in the Italian independent software vendor (ISV) industry, with €56 million annual turnover. The company provides a long-term digital archiving service and maintains documents, such as digital invoices, for 250,000 Italian business customers in a managed infrastructure.

Founded in 2000, Namirial has a strong presence in the small and medium-sized business (SMB) and enterprise markets and across the commercial and public sectors. It has customers in almost every market vertical, including automotive, financial services, manufacturing, retail, and telecoms. Data security and sovereignty are critical for its long-term archiving application.

Namirial has been using Amazon Web Services (AWS) to support its business for more than 8 years. However, prior to the launch of the AWS Europe (Milan) Region in April 2020, Namirial used a colocation facility in Treviso with a data center managed by a local telco for its digital archiving service. This setup was necessary for its archiving service to comply with Italian regulatory and data protection requirements that restrict the storage and movement of data outside of the country.

However, using this colocation facility posed many challenges. Namirial had to pre-provision everything from CPUs and RAM to the network file system (NFS), the latter terabyte by terabyte. This was impractical because its business demand was unpredictable and, to avoid disruption, Namirial had to over provision some resources. There were also issues with machines that could not be scaled up or down due to the underlying technology, as well as occasional outages caused by under-provisioned storage.

With the rapid growth of customers and data for its digital archiving service, Namirial was also facing a situation where the colocation facility in Treviso was quickly running out of space and would not be able to scale up to meet demand.


When the AWS Europe (Milan) region launched, it was the perfect opportunity for Namirial to migrate its long-term data archiving application from the managed colocation facility in Treviso to AWS. Consolidating onto AWS would help reduce complexity, increase performance and scalability, and improve security and governance.

The smooth and easy migration to AWS required just three people from Namirial’s cloud operations team. After six months of planning, the migration was successfully completed in one night to minimize the impact on the service and the 250,000 business customers that use Namirial’s digital archiving application.

Crucially, the migration of Namirial’s digital archiving application to AWS Europe (Milan) complies with Italian data sovereignty requirements and has improved governance and security by simplifying security policy maintenance and management and enabling the detection of threats in near real-time.

Aside from the AWS Europe (Milan) region infrastructure itself, the key AWS services used by Namirial for the long-term archiving application include Amazon Simple Storage Service  (Amazon S3) to provide object storage for documents such as PDF and XML files for digital invoicing, as well as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud  (Amazon EC2) and AWS Lambda.

Technical debt and cost were reduced by using the different layers of Amazon S3 to optimize costs. AWS CloudFormation has increased agility and enabled faster innovation by reducing the time to deploy infrastructure from a few days to just a few hours. The main AWS CloudFormation template runs and creates all the necessary resources in just 10 minutes.

With AWS it is now much easier and faster for Namirial to spin-up new infrastructure and services to meet increasing demand—there are currently 80TB of data that the company archives, but this is predicted to grow by 30TB per year.

Massimiliano Pellegrini, CEO of Namirial, says: “We can now scale up the performance of the entire long-term archiving system and scale down automatically when the rush passes, which reduces costs. And we can have multiple environments at any stage, and any one can be as similar to the production one as possible.”

One example of the performance improvement after the AWS migration is a monthly billing report that used to take 15 hours to complete but now takes just 3 hours.

The AWS Europe (Milan) region will also enable further improvements and Namirial is planning to use AWS CodeDeploy as part of its code pipeline to enable faster application development and updating. “We also want to use more serverless services and we are looking into the AWS Machine Learning services to create a new way for managing documents,” says Davide Coletto, group CTO at Namirial.