POTS lines power fire alarms, elevator phones, panic buttons, and dozens of other systems that enterprises depend on every day. When those lines get replaced, the POTS replacement provider taking over that responsibility is carrying real weight. A missed alert, an unreachable device, or a security gap in the underlying platform is not a minor inconvenience. For many of the systems we support, it is a life-safety issue.
Decommissioning of POTS lines is happening now and accelerating at a record pace. Enterprises that have waited are running out of runway, and the provider they choose needs to be ready to operate at scale, securely, and reliably across dozens or thousands of sites nationwide.
Late last year MarketSpark undertook a significant modernization of our cloud infrastructure. What started as a natural next step in our growth became something that directly benefits every enterprise customer we serve. This is the story of what we changed, why we changed it, and what it means for the reliability of the service you depend on.
Where MarketSpark Started and Why it Was Time to Evolve
Like most technology companies in their early stages, MarketSpark built infrastructure to move quickly. A consolidated cloud environment made sense at the time and served us well as we found our footing and scaled the business.
As we grew to serve more than 500 of America’s largest enterprises, that foundation needed to grow with us. The architecture that works well for a startup starts to show its limits at enterprise scale: environments become harder to isolate, changes require more coordination, and the operational overhead of managing everything in one place compounds over time.
Making infrastructure changes also meant manual configuration through the AWS Console. That approach works at small scale, but it becomes a bottleneck as the team and the product grow. Changes were harder to review, harder to track, and harder to reproduce consistently across environments.
We recognized that there was a better future we needed to start working towards. One where we could continue to scale responsibly while ensuring the platform we provide is well structured, consistent and secure. The question was how to get there without disrupting a business that was growing fast.
Choosing the Right Partner
The scope of work required was significant enough that attempting it in parallel with running a growing product business would mean it would never get done sufficiently. MarketSpark needed a partner with deep AWS architecture expertise, the ability to move fast without creating new problems, and a commitment to building something the engineering team could own and operate long after the engagement ended.
We chose Masterpoint. They had a strong track record with AWS infrastructure modernization, worked within our existing systems and constraints rather than pushing the same boiler plate solutions, and left us with infrastructure that is clean, well-documented, and ours to build on.
What We Built with Our Partner
Multi-Account AWS Organization
The most foundational change was moving to a multi-account structure organized within an AWS Organization. Each environment now lives in its own isolated account with its own network and access boundaries.
This provides meaningful separation between environments. A problem in a non-production environment stays contained there. It also creates clearer boundaries for access control, cost attribution, and compliance, which matters increasingly as enterprise customers demand more information about how their data is handled.
Access management was also modernized. Engineers now authenticate through our existing corporate identity provider and receive time-limited sessions. Organizational guardrails enforce security policies consistently across all accounts.
Infrastructure as Code
Every cloud resource MarketSpark operates is now declared in OpenTofu, the open-source Terraform fork. Services are codified consistently across all environments and managed through the same review and version control processes as application code.
The practical difference is significant. Infrastructure decisions are auditable. When something changes, there is a record of who proposed it, who reviewed it, and when it was applied. Reproducing an environment for disaster recovery or debugging is running code, not reconstructing something from memory. Consistency across environments is enforced rather than assumed.
The ECS fleet was also migrated to AWS Fargate serverless compute, removing the overhead of managing underlying instances and allowing each service to be right-sized independently. This means we can focus on delivering for customers rather than tinkering with bare metal instances.
Full Automation
Infrastructure as code is only as good as the workflow around it. We implemented Spacelift as our automated provisioning platform, with policy-as-code enforcement baked in. Changes to infrastructure now follow the same pull request and review process as application code, with deployment triggered through CI/CD integration with GitHub.
Console-based configuration is gone. That eliminates the configuration drift that accumulates over time when changes happen outside of a structured process, and it gives the team a consistent, repeatable way to make changes safely.
What Else Got Fixed Along the Way
Infrastructure modernization creates the opportunity to address things that accumulate over time but never quite make it to the top of the priority list.
Network access was modernized with Tailscale Zero-Trust Access. Access is now identity-based and scoped to what is actually needed rather than broad access granted at the network perimeter.
Observability was centralized through Datadog. Logs, metrics, and traces from across the infrastructure now flow into a single place, giving the team complete visibility and total control over what is happening in real time. Issues surface to us before they surface to customers.
The database layer was upgraded, device network connectivity was rearchitected, and naming and tagging conventions were standardized across all resources to support proper cost attribution. TLS encryption is enforced for all database connections.
The Results
The outcomes were concrete and measurable.
Infrastructure provisioning that used to take days now takes minutes. Full-region disaster recovery, which previously would have required weeks of effort, is now achievable in hours. The team identifies and responds to issues faster and with more confidence.
On security and compliance: environment isolation means a problem in one area cannot propagate across the system, and the audit trail and controls required for SOC 2 and ISO 27001 alignment are now in place.
On cost: Fargate Spot utilization delivers up to 70% savings on eligible compute workloads, replacing the old approach of over-provisioning shared infrastructure with per-service right-sizing.
What This Means for MarketSpark Customers
When your POTS lines are replaced with MarketSpark, you are depending on us for alarm panel communications, elevator phones, panic buttons, and other systems where reliability is non-negotiable. The infrastructure handling your devices and your data now runs on a foundation that is isolated, automated, observable, and built to scale. Problems get caught faster, changes get made more safely, and the team has the tools to respond effectively when something goes wrong.
This is what nationwide, secure, reliable, and scalable infrastructure looks like in practice. Not a promise, but a set of specific architectural decisions and practices you can hold us accountable to. It is part of what gives MarketSpark a 98% initial install acceptance rate, the highest in our industry, and what lets us confidently serve deployments ranging from dozens of sites to thousands.
Closing
MarketSpark’s mission is to make the transition away from legacy POTS infrastructure straightforward for enterprises. That means not just providing the connectivity, but being the kind of provider that enterprises can genuinely rely on when it counts.
This infrastructure modernization was a significant investment in reliability, security, and operational maturity, and one the engineering team is proud of. We built something we can leverage for years to come.
If you are an enterprise evaluating POTS replacement providers and want to understand more about how we operate, we are happy to talk. MarketSpark’s world-class infrastructure helps keeps you connected where others can’t.