Cloud-Based CRM Modernization Helped WinningMoves Scale Faster and Reduce Deployment Complexity

WinningMoves, a leading UK-based research and business services provider, modernized its legacy CRM infrastructure by migrating to a scalable, cloud-native platform on AWS. The project introduced a multi-tenant architecture, centralized deployment, and improved monitoring, delivering significant improvements in deployment speed, regulatory compliance, and system resilience.

As public sector engagement grew and WinningMoves expanded its CRM services, the company faced performance bottlenecks and operational inefficiencies in its legacy infrastructure. The existing setup hosted application code, database, and file storage on a single server in a DigitalOcean environment, combining outdated technology with tightly coupled deployment.

The monolithic design created challenges in onboarding new clients, requiring manual duplication of infrastructure and slow, error-prone processes. Additionally, the system lacked multi-tenant support, forcing redundant code and data across isolated CRM instances.

To solve these issues, WinningMoves partnered with AWS to design and implement a cloud-native CRM platform capable of supporting multiple clients from a centralized system. The project focused on modern deployment practices, cost-effective storage, database scalability, and regional compliance. The shift to AWS included deploying Amazon Aurora with a tenant-aware schema, storing assets in Amazon S3 with lifecycle policies, and establishing CI/CD pipelines for rapid iteration and reliable rollouts.

With the new architecture in place, WinningMoves transformed its delivery model — reducing complexity, improving time-to-market, and enabling expansion into new regions without duplicating infrastructure.

WinningMoves operated a legacy CRM application hosted on a single-server environment built on DigitalOcean’s VPS infrastructure. The system featured a monolithic architecture, where application code, database, and storage were tightly coupled within a single deployment. This setup resulted in limited scalability and performance bottlenecks, particularly as client demand increased and system complexity grew. Each new CRM instance required manual provisioning, making client onboarding time-consuming and heavily dependent on developer effort. The lack of automation and reusable components introduced high operational overhead, making it difficult to introduce new features, custom branding, or scale services across regions. Additionally, the platform lacked support for modern data residency regulations, offering no built-in mechanism to ensure data localization in compliance with GDPR or regional privacy laws. These architectural constraints not only hindered the company’s ability to grow but also made it incompatible with modern DevOps practices and cloud-native design principles. Recognizing these limitations, WinningMoves made the strategic decision to initiate a ground-up re-architecture to build a scalable, compliant, and future-ready solution.

AWS and WinningMoves partnered to execute a comprehensive cloud infrastructure modernization initiative aimed at building a scalable, secure, and compliant platform capable of supporting long-term growth and operational agility. At the heart of the transformation was the development of a multi-tenant CRM architecture using Amazon Aurora MySQL, which provided a regionally aware schema design to ensure that client data remained within the appropriate geographic boundaries for GDPR and Australian privacy compliance. This structural redesign allowed for dynamic onboarding of new clients within a centralized, configurable framework, eliminating the need to replicate entire infrastructure stacks for each new engagement.

As part of the modernization, all static content, documents, and media files were migrated to Amazon S3, where lifecycle policies were implemented to automatically manage data retention, reduce long-term storage costs, and meet regulatory recordkeeping requirements. Application code and business logic were deployed on Amazon EC2 instances, which were placed in isolated VPCs to maximize network security. These instances leveraged encrypted EBS volumes, reinforcing the security of customer data at rest while ensuring compatibility with strict compliance mandates.

To accelerate application delivery and reduce the risk of manual deployment errors, WinningMoves introduced fully automated CI/CD pipelines using AWS CodeDeploy. This enabled repeatable, version-controlled deployments across development, staging, and production environments, significantly improving the speed and reliability of software rollouts. In parallel, a centralized observability layer was established using Amazon CloudWatch for metrics collection, AWS CloudTrail for governance and auditing, and IAM-based access policies to tightly control permissions and traceability across environments.

To safeguard operations and ensure rapid recovery in the event of a failure, the team implemented robust disaster recovery workflows. These included encrypted, cross-region S3 backups of both application data and user-generated content, ensuring durability and minimizing data loss. The entire solution was deployed across three AWS regions — London, Ireland, and Sydney — each configured to meet the data sovereignty and availability requirements of clients in Europe and Australia.

The modernization effort was carefully executed in a phased approach, beginning with environment provisioning and followed by incremental workload migration. This allowed the team to rigorously test each component for business continuity, security, and performance without impacting live services. Parallel cutover strategies were used to maintain zero disruption to existing customers, while extensive BCDR testing validated system resilience and readiness for future scaling.