AWS Case Studies
As AWS Advanced Partners, we provide AWS cloud infrastructure managed services including architecting, migration, security, maintenance and monitoring of your AWS environments with a security and compliance emphasis.
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CareConnect
Health Information Exchange
About the Client
The first of its kind in South Africa, CareConnect HIE (Health Information Exchange) is a not-for-profit organization formed to facilitate the authorized exchange of information between hospitals, clinics and medical aids to ensure that patients receive the best possible care. The organization was founded by six organizations, including Discovery Health, Momentum Health, Mediclinic, Life Healthcare, Medscheme, and Netcare.
The Challenge
“A key learning that we have taken from the pandemic is that there is greater awareness and need for a HIE to enable the sharing and exchange of information. Covid-19 will be with us for a long time and I’m confident that the development of more clinically focused use cases will be high on the agenda for CareConnect HIE and its Founding Members.”
Dr Rolan Christian, Chief Executive Officer at CareConnect HIE.
As a startup representing numerous hospitals and medical aid administrators, CareConnect HIE needed a highly secure and HIPAA-compliant platform to host its Health Information Exchange data, where authorized health professionals could securely share relevant patient health information between hospitals, and medical aids.
“It acts as a hub for both the public and the private sectors. The CareConnect HIE will be a critical enabler for our health system, one that fosters innovation and integration with all the necessary governance structures in place to ensure fairness. This HIE has been built with the gold standard of governance and security to protect clinical data –the most sensitive of information.”
Dr Rolan Christian, Chief Executive Officer at CareConnect HIE.
Thus, CareConnect HIE decided to bring in an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner (Silicon Overdrive) to assist with the build of their data platform in a secure and compliant AWS environment.
The Solution
Silicon Overdrive architected a secure, highly available, and cost-optimized solution to integrate CareConnect HIE’s and protect the six Founding Members’ health information data.
We implemented an AWS Landing Zone best-practice, secure and compliant AWS account structure, segregating network, development, staging and production AWS accounts. Each environment has its own supporting infrastructure for the HIE.
By making use of a Transit Gateway, Founding Members are able to connect to a central hub, simplifying network integration and allowing for effortless collaboration and information exchange.
We leveraged Fortinet FortiGate through the AWS Marketplace for secure management access to different environments. FortiGate provides its users with protection from an array of threats, including application control, web filtering, and other advanced security features including extreme threat database and vulnerability management.
Some key AWS services utilized in these environments include Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to provide secure, resizable compute capacity for hosting applications, Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) for content and data storage, and Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) to distribute incoming traffic.
Security and compliance services utilized include AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), Trusted Advisor, Trend Micro Cloud One™ – Conformity (scans for risk remediation, compliance) and Workload Security.
For secure AWS management console and programmatic access, SSO (Single Sign-One) has been set up to manage access across various AWS accounts on a least-privilege access.
For compliance, we integrated AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) with AWS CloudTrail to provide the AWS team with control of encrypted data and content as well as logs. CloudTrail is also used by account managers to monitor activities within the AWS accounts.
Other security and compliance services utilized were AWS Config, used to assess, audit, and evaluate configurations implemented for AWS resources.
CareConnect’s architecture and recommendations were based on the AWS Well-Architected Framework, ISO 27001 and HIPAA security best practices to limit the risk of breaches, and non-compliance regulatory requirements.
The Outcome
CareConnect HIE’s is hosted in a highly secure, ISO 27001, and HIPAA-compliant environment, where patients’ sensitive health information is protected while being shared with hospitals, clinics and medical aids.
Post the build out on AWS, Silicon Overdrive conducted a scan of the environment using Trend Micro Cloud One™ – Conformity, where CareConnect HIE successfully achieved a high HIPAA compliance score. CareConnect also achieved high scores for both ISO and GDPR compliance, which is important to CareConnect’s stakeholders.
The Silicon Overdrive engineering teams were able to deploy the new environment on AWS with a highly available and compliant architecture. Since the environment went live, the HIE has experienced zero downtime.
According to Dr Rolan Christian, Chief Executive Officer at CareConnect HIE, “Silicon Overdrive has proven themselves as a very competent AWS partner that has delivered a high-quality solution for CareConnect. They have guided CareConnect on how to optimize their AWS usage spend and recover costs, as part of our maintenance agreement with Silicon Overdrive. They have also shown great flexibility to support us when dealing with our requirements and budget limitations as a non-profit.”
Silicon Overdrive continues to support and maintain CareConnect HIE’s environment under a Managed Service Agreement, ensuring that the workloads are secure and compliant, that risks are mitigated, and that the HIE is always available for continuity of services.
“The HIE is data driven and the data provides the narrative. If the participants of the HIE share as much data as possible, the HIE becomes THE source of truth. This is ultimately the value of a HIE.” Dr. Rolan Christian
CMS Systems - HR Migration
About the Client
CMS Systems is a market leader in cloud-based software solutions for the automotive industry, providing all-in-one dealership customer management solutions.
The CMS Sales Solutions ensure all prospects are attracted, captured, and followed up effectively, increasing test drives and all other actions that have been proven to increase sales.
All their partners are backed up by a team of automotive and software experts, focused on simplicity, ensuring their dealership has the best tools to close more deals in less time. Along with solutions for managing and growing dealership customer loyalty.
The Challenge
CMS Systems was rapidly expanding and their on-premise system was not sufficient for their growth. They experienced the risk of possible downtime, server, hardware and network-related inconsistencies that prompted the decision to fast-track their move to the AWS cloud.
At the AWS Summit at the Cape Town Convention Summit in 2019, CMS System got introduced to Silicon Overdrive. Once in touch, they requested Silicon Overdrive to architect a scalable, highly available and secure solution on the AWS Cloud.
They also had a business requirement to be POPIA and GDPR compliant as their clients store sensitive personal information that needed to be secured.
The Solution
To meet their compliance and resolve data sovereignty issues, Silicon Overdrive moved the CMS Systems infrastructures to both Ireland and the Cape Town region in order to comply with POPIA and GDPR compliance regulations and corporate governance requirements.
They also split out their workloads into separate accounts in order to segregate workloads between clients, this allowed for easier management of clients.
Auto Scaling was configured for self-healing which allows for the increased reliability desired by the customer. Should the availability zone or the instance go down the self-healing auto scaling group will automatically spin up a new instance in the second availability zone to ensure there is no interruption to the end user. By also making use of Amazon FSx this allows for uninterrupted service when a new service is spun up.
CMS Systems is also able to decide and change, at a moment’s notice the Amazon EC2 instance type and size. This means that as they onboard clients quickly, they are not held back by the providers’ inability to scale the machine’s capabilities as and when they need it.
Silicon Overdrive implemented the AWS Application Load Balancer which increased scalability, allowed for minimal downtime and automatically accommodated increases in traffic. It also allows for monitoring CMS Systems’ health of its registered targets and routes traffic only to the healthy targets as required.
To ensure secure sign-in into their environment and thus increasing their overall security CMS Systems now make use of a Fortigate VPN, this IPSec VPN tunnel ensures that there is no traffic over the public internet when accessing their environment.
The Outcome
Since the migration to the AWS Cloud, CMS Systems has experienced no downtime and attracted more users to their platform. Their application has been able to run on a single instance with the ability to evolve and add more features.
The new solution met the requirement to be scalable so that CMS Systems could scale according to the increase in customers that they were experiencing. The flexibility to increase the instance sizes on the fly was a functionality that they didn’t previously have but now enjoy.
Silicon Overdrive architected a best practice scalable, highly available and secure solution on the AWS Cloud. CMS Systems intends to apply for their ISO27001 and requires their workloads to be compliant and secure.
CMS Systems has not only benefitted from the new infrastructure on AWS but are also enjoying the services that they are currently using. As a result of this, they are actively looking into other AWS services that will benefit their current and future workload.
Francois Kemp, Head of Development and IT CMS Systems said,
“We selected Silicon Overdrive as our preferred Partner to assist us on our cloud journey. Their experience and knowledge on security and AWS Architecture has made our migration seamless.”
Computer Mania
About the Client
Computer Mania is the largest independent technology retailer with an online store and retail stores in major Western Cape and Gauteng shopping centres. Founded in 1991, Computer Mania provides you with the needed software, hardware, accessories, and more for personal, business, or gaming applications. Their passion for their business is one of the main reasons for their ongoing success.
The Challenge
Computer Mania had concerns about the reliability and security of its legacy environment and reached out to Silicon Overdrive for assistance. One of their primary concerns was the scalability of their environment during increased traffic generated over Black Friday, one of the most anticipated online shopping events in the world.
Not having a secure, reliable infrastructure capable of handling fluctuations in traffic could also result in their site crashing once visitors flooded the site.
The Outcome
After a successful migration to AWS, Computer Mania maintained uptime during Black Friday and was able to accommodate the load in web traffic to their website, due to the implemented scaling capabilities.
With the added security services, including Trend Micro Deep Security and Amazon CloudWatch, Computer Mania’s application is secure, protecting user account details and credit card info, allowing customers to shop online safely.
Another notable outcome is that by moving to the cloud, Computer Mania’s site is faster, more reliable, and highly available during significant, yet manic, shopping events like Black Friday, improving the management of customer expectations.
The Solution
As an online retailer, Computer Mania expected a rapid increase in their website traffic during the popular annual event. To manage these surges in traffic, Computer Mania needed a scalable application that could grow in response to demand.
To achieve this, Silicon Overdrive migrated the Computer Mania Magento e-commerce platform to AWS to increase availability. As part of the migration, Silicon Overdrive rearchitected the environment to include AWS managed services such as Amazon RDS, which ensured Computer Mania’s site would remain available during peak times.
In addition, Silicon Overdrive implemented Amazon CloudWatch in order to have insight into Computer Mania’s application, respond to changes in its performance, optimise its resource utilisation, and get a unified view of its operational health.
With Trend Micro Deep Security in place, Silicon Overdrive added automated protection for Computer Mania’s workloads while simplifying compliance. With a SaaS solution like Deep Security, Computer Mania’s environment is safe against threats, malware, and vulnerabilities.
The Solution
They also split out their workloads into separate accounts in order to segregate workloads between clients, this allowed for easier management of clients in different regions internationally.
Auto Scaling was configured for self-healing which allows for the increased reliability desired by the customer. Should the availability zone or the instance go down the self-healing auto-scaling group will automatically spin up a new instance in the second availability zone to ensure there is no interruption to the end user.
CMS Systems is also able to decide and change, at a moment’s notice, the Amazon EC2 instance type and size. This means that as they onboard clients quickly, they are not held back by the providers’ inability to scale the machine’s capabilities as and when they need it.
Silicon Overdrive implemented the AWS Application Load Balancer which increased scalability, allowed for minimal downtime and automatically accommodated increases in traffic. It also allows for monitoring CMS Systems health of its registered targets, and routes traffic only to the healthy targets as required.
To ensure secure sign-in into their environment and thus increasing their overall security CMS Systems now make use of a Fortigate VPN, this IPSec VPN tunnel ensures that there is no traffic over the public internet when accessing their environment.
By making use of infrastructure as code (Terraform scripting) we were able to quickly and accurately replicate the workload into the new account dedicated to their Middle East and Europe customer base.
CMS Systems
Windows Global Migration
About the Client
CMS Systems is a market leader in cloud-based software solutions for the automotive industry, providing all-in-one dealership customer management solutions.
The CMS Sales Solutions ensure all prospects are attracted, captured, and followed up effectively, increasing test drives and all other actions that have been proven to increase sales.
All their partners are backed up by a team of automotive and software experts, focused on simplicity, ensuring their dealership has the best tools to close more deals in less time. Along with solutions for managing and growing dealership customer loyalty.
CMS Systems Windows global workload is a replication of their main production workload that has been deployed with the purpose of servicing their growing international customer base in the Middle East and Europe.
The Challenge
CMS Systems has been gradually expanding into the Middle East and Europe. They reached out to Silicon Overdrive to assist them in separating their production workload into two segregated workloads, both operating out of Ireland but with one workload servicing customers in South Africa and the other dedicated to servicing their growing international customer base in the Middle East and Europe.
CMS Systems was rapidly expanding and identified the need to separate international regions from their South African workloads.
They reached out to Silicon Overdrive to architect a scalable, highly available and secure solution on the AWS Cloud for their Global customer base in line with their current workloads and architectures on AWS.
They also had a business requirement to be GDPR compliant and ready especially for their potential customers in Europe.
The Outcome
Since the migration to the AWS Cloud, CMS Systems has experienced no downtime and attracted more users to their platform. Their application has been able to run on a single instance with the ability to evolve and add more features.
The new solution met the requirement to be scalable so that CMS Systems could scale according to the increase in customers that they were experiencing. The flexibility to increase the instance sizes on the fly was a functionality that they didn’t previously have but now enjoy.
Silicon Overdrive architected a best practice scalable, highly available and secure solution on the AWS Cloud. CMS Systems intends to apply for their ISO27001 and requires their workloads to be compliant and secure.
CMS Systems has not only benefitted from the new infrastructure on AWS but are also enjoying the services that they are currently using. As a result of this, they are actively looking into other AWS services that will benefit their current and future workload.
Francois Kemp, Director and Head of Development at CMS Systems said, “With my experience with Silicon Overdrive helping our South African operations, they were an obvious choice in expanding into Europe and the Middle East.”
Adumo Online
About the Client
The Challenge
The Solution
The Outcome
According to Christiaan Mienie, Adumo Online’s Chief Technical Officer, “The team provided good sound advice on PCI DSS and general best practices. They acted in a professional manner, were detail orientated and easily accessible when required.”
Lupiya
About the Client
The Challenge
The Solution
The Outcome
Blue Pearl
About the Client
Since its launch in June 2020, Blue App has enrolled over 200 skilled consultants and 17 companies and has sold more than 11235 project hours.
The Challenge
The Blue Pearl team knew that in order to scale and meet the future demands of their customers, they would need to adopt a cloud solution. So they started by building a development environment on AWS to experiment with the services available.
The Solution
Silicon Overdrive worked with the Blue Pearl team to design a secure, highly-available architecture that would leverage serverless design principles.
After the initial discussions, we redesigned their environment to use MongoDB, an open-source, NoSQL database that provides support for JSON-styled, document-oriented storage systems, AWS Lambda, an event-driven, serverless computing platform, AWS Config, a service that enables you to assess, audit, and evaluate the configurations of your AWS resources and more. We also used AWS Amplify, a Serverless Framework platform for building secure, scalable mobile, and web applications which makes it easy to authenticate users, securely store data and user metadata, authenticate selective access to data, integrate machine learning, analyze usage metrics, and implement server-side code.
The architecture and recommendations were based on the AWS Well-Architected Framework, and AWS, ISO 27001 and GDPR security best practices to limit the risk of a breach, and non-compliance with regulatory requirements.
The Outcome
The new environment was built to AWS best practices and met all of Blue Pearl’s business requirements. Blue Pearl can now scale their operations in a serverless environment, allowing for the faster onboarding of new customers while also meeting their security, scalability and availability requirements.
Electrum
The Challenge
Electrum provides enterprise software that represents the next generation of payments technology. Major banks, retailers and MNOs use Electrum’s technology to accept payments, process financial transactions and provide value-added services. To become this force in their industry, Electrum needed infrastructure that could scale to meet the demands of their increasing customer base and create a gateway switch for enterprise customers to engage with consumers while maintaining strict security compliance.
The Solution
Silicon Overdrive met with Electrum’s decision-makers to discuss how we could assist them with reaching their goals. With a very tight deadline, Silicon Overdrive architected a solution, which included deploying services, such as:
- EC2 instances for computing power
- RDS for relational databases
- CloudWatch and CloudTrail for monitoring, alerting and other network services, and
- AWS load balancing and VPNs, as well as the required networking infrastructure
The Outcome
Following the deployment of their infrastructure in AWS, with the guidance and assistance of Silicon Overdrive’s AWS team, Electrum successfully converted their environment from Infrastructure as a Service to Software as a Service, thereby increasing their turnover and profitability. They now process over four billion transactions in milliseconds every year and provide their customers with 99.999% uptime. Silicon Overdrive also assisted with implementing digital goods and services systems for Electrum’s large retail customers to sell prepaid airtime and data, electricity, LOTTO, travel tickets and gift cards, and provide money transfer and bill payment services. Silicon Overdrive continues to provide technical assistance in building out Electrum’s environments and monitoring, securing and maintaining these environments.
PayGate
The Challenge
Founded in 1996, PayGate wanted to become a force in the payment gateway industry, both in Africa as well as internationally. To reach this goal, PayGate needed to scale their infrastructure to accommodate the traffic that would come with taking on more customers but where found that there were no data centres capable of providing them with the correct security and compliance needed to growth their business. PayGate needed a solution which would allow them to increase their client base, maintain high security, and become PCI compliant, while at the same time be a cost-effective option.
The Solution
The Outcome
With the assistance and guidance of Silicon Overdrive, PayGate has ensured that they continue to be PCI Compliant six years later and Silicon Overdrive has architected over 60 server instances and set up numerous applications, allowing PayGate to process more transactions per minute, increasing their overall turnover considerably. PayGate remains one of Silicon Overdrive’s valued Clients, signing on for one of our tailored support and maintenance agreements, ensuring that their infrastructure is maintained on a continuous basis. PayGate is now one of the leading payment platforms in Africa and counts some of the continents’ largest and most well-respected companies as their Clients, as well as some internationally recognised organisations.
University of Pretoria
The Challenge
University of Pretoria is one of the top research institutions in Africa and its mission is to be a leading research-intensive university in Africa. It has been recognised internationally for its quality, relevance and impact, as well as for developing people, creating knowledge and making a difference locally and globally.
The University was hosting their web applications on co-located and on-prem infrastructures and often experienced downtime. The University also was incurring high capex and co-location costs
To deliver a world-class digital presence that reflected the University of Pretoria’s mission, Silicon Overdrive was asked to solve issues related to availability, scalability and security for their web applications.
The Solution
The University of Pretoria approached Silicon Overdrive to improve the security and performance of its website. Silicon Overdrive’s AWS certified engineers ran an assessment of the current environment against the AWS Well-Architected Framework and security best practices. The outcome was to architect and build out an entirely new environment using AWS services such as Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, Amazon Route 53, Amazon CloudWatch, AWS Identity and Access Management and Amazon EFS to meet University of Pretoria’s needs to ensure high availability, security and compliance.
Costs were significantly reduced on migrating to AWS. Right sizing and leveraging Reserved Instances reduced these costs further.
The Outcome
Silicon Overdrive architected and built out the University of Pretoria’s infrastructure according to AWS and security best practices to meet the University’s requirements for a cost optimised, high availability, secure and compliant hosting environment. The AWS team worked with the University’s management and software development team to successfully migrate to this new environment. Silicon Overdrive continues to support and maintain the University of Pretoria’s new environment under a Managed Service Level Agreement.
University of the Witwatersrand - Sakai
The Challenge
The University of the Witwatersrand is a multi-campus South African public research university situated in the northern areas of central Johannesburg. It is more commonly known as Wits University or Wits.
Wits had an urgent requirement to move their Sakai Learning Management System (LMS) from their on-premise servers to the cloud due to the COVID-19 lockdown and to ensure availability, security and compliance.
After experiencing an outage on their on-premise Sakai environment at peak demand, the University started exploring cloud solutions to ensure the availability of their LMS to their students and faculty.
The Solution
The Outcome
Turnaround time for this project was of paramount importance. The teams were able to launch the new environment and migrate from the on-prem environment to AWS in just over a month. Since the new environment went live, Wits has had 100% uptime. The students now have an unparalleled user experience due to fast and locally cached content, and zero-rated data charges.
FileFlow
The Challenge
FileFlow saw a business need to put their clients in control of the compliance document collection process using a simple, white labelled, mobile-compatible web interface. The application needed to collect documentation, create automated email reminders requesting the documents on their customer’s behalf and allow them to revise the documents while creating a full audit history. To achieve this, they needed a platform and application which was secure enough to collect and store this data, with high availability and scalability.
The Solution
FileFlow and Silicon Overdrive’s certified AWS engineers architected a solution using AWS services which included Amazon EC2 for the hosting of the website and web applications, Amazon EBS volumes with encryption for data at rest and Amazon MySQL RDS for database hosting, in multi-AZ also with encryption for data at rest. Amazon CloudWatch and Amazon SNS were also used for monitoring, alarms, notifications, and scheduled backups and tasks and Amazon S3 was also used for file, log and backup storage, ensuring high availability, security and compliance.
The Outcome
FileFlow and Silicon Overdrive architected and built out FileFlow’s infrastructure according to AWS Well-Architected Framework and security best practices to meet their requirements for a scalable, highly available, secure and compliant hosting environment. The completed deployment was a simple, white labelled, web interface which is mobile compatible, giving their customers more control over the documentation collection process and thereby increasing the operational efficiency of their customer’s business. Silicon Overdrive continues to support FileFlow’s environment.
SwitchPay
The Challenge
SwitchPay is a dynamic and innovative solutions provider in financial technology, switching and acquisition solutions. With over 20 year’s technology and finance experience, SwitchPay has grown into a key solutions provider across multiple industries. As the company grows, they need to ensure that they are scalable, while still meeting compliance requirements. Additionally, SwitchPay was experiencing a few errors with their Windows Server 2016 infrastructure, which they asked Silicon Overdrive to audit and bring up to industry best practices.
The Solution
Silicon Overdrive architected and migrated the SwitchPay Windows-based payment processing infrastructure to AWS to ensure high-availability and meet security and compliance requirements.
Some of the AWS Services used include, AWS Directory Service, Amazon RDS for SQL Server, Amazon EBS.
These Microsoft technologies were leveraged in the solution: IIS, MSSQL, Active Directory, RDP Gateway
The Outcome
Following the deployment of their infrastructure on AWS, with the guidance and assistance of Silicon Overdrive’s AWS team, SwitchPay was able to migrate their applications to AWS and meet security and PCI DSS compliance requirements. Silicon Overdrive continues to provide technical assistance in building out their environments and monitoring, securing and maintaining these environments.
Sorbet
The Challenge
Sorbet is a national chain of beauty salons that offers nail, hair and skin care solutions for men and women. In order to grow, Sorbet relies on a specific set of Business Intelligence (BI) tools. But, Sorbet’s BI tools were unable to run against their Microsoft SQL Server RDS instance. They required a reliable solution to ensure that they could use their tools.
The Solution
Silicon Overdrive set up ongoing replication between the Microsoft SQL Server RDS instance with an EC2 hosted Microsoft SQL Server instance using the AWS Database Migration Service, thus ensuring their BI tools perform optimally. Some of the AWS services used include Amazon RDS for SQL Server, Amazon EBS.
These Microsoft technologies were leveraged in the solution: IIS, MSSQL, RDP Gateway
The Outcome
The ongoing replication of the Microsoft SQL Server RDS enabled Sorbet to meet operational requirements, and ensured that their infrastructure is highly available.
FlexPay Technologies
The Challenge
FlexPay Technologies enables companies to offer their customers flexible ways to pay for their products and services. Whether it’s retail shopping, school fees, tour and travel or crowd funding, FlexPay provides a financing management platform of flexible, instalments and payment options. To meet an increasing demand for their services, FlexPay needed a scalable environment to migrate their application to, with high availability whilst ensuring security compliance.
The Solution
FlexPay approached Silicon Overdrive to assist with developing an environment capable of supporting their burgeoning e-commerce business. Silicon Overdrive’s AWS-certified team architected and engineered an entirely new, highly available, auto-scaling production environment in accordance with AWS Best Practices, making use of Amazon EBS volumes with Encryption for data at rest, Amazon S3 for Backups, Log storage, website content and media storage, as well as Amazon SES and Amazon SNS for notifications. Silicon Overdrive’s solution also included the use of Amazon CloudWatch, AWS Lambda, AWS CloudTrail and Amazon Route 53.
The Outcome
Change Technologies
The Challenge
Change Technologies enables users to invest as little as €1 into cryptocurrencies. Their model means that there are no minimum balances, no commission, and no unfair barriers, meaning that anyone with a Smartphone can invest in cryptocurrency.
Since Change Technologies deals with cryptocurrency and processes card payments, they were required to achieve PCI DSS compliance to ensure the security of the data.
Upon assessing their environment, Change Technologies found that their current environment deviated from best practices and compliance standards. It was decided that the best solution to become PCI DSS compliant would be to bring in a AWS consulting partner (Silicon Overdrive) to assist with the process of re-architecting, rebuilding and migrating their workloads to a secure and compliant AWS environment.
The Solution
Silicon Overdrive met with Change Technologies’ team and architected a solution based on AWS best practices to meet their PCI compliance requirements.
We rearchitected and redeployed the environment with the focus on security and automation.
AWS CDK (Cloud Development Kit) was used for Infrastructure as Code so that changes could be versioned and deployed on demand. AWS Config is used to simplify security analysis, change management and compliance auditing, which reduces operational overheads on their team and time required for and thus reduced the cost of their compliance audit.
All EC2 instances were migrated to serverless services to reduce operational overheads, improve performance, availability, scalability and security. These services include API Gateway, ECS Fargate and AWS Lambda.
DevOps services used: API Gateway, VPC, IAM, S3, ECS Fargate, RDS, SNS, Security Hub, Config, CloudWatch, CloudTrail, Trusted Advisor, Route 53, AWS VPN, AWS Cloud Development Kit, CloudFormation, Certificate Manager, Lambda
Third-party apps used: Circle CI
Project Manager: Charlton Daniels
The Outcome
Lessons Learned
The Outcome
By establishing secure, automated deployments, Electrum can now scale their operations, allowing for the faster onboarding of new customers while meeting their security and ISO 27001 compliance requirements by ensuring that all deployments and infrastructures use the same base architecture and configuration.
Lessons Learned
Electrum
The Challenge
Electrum Payments provides enterprise software that represents the next generation of payments technology. Major retailers & financial institutions use Electrum’s technology to accept payments, process financial transactions and provide value-added services.
Electrum Payments needed a deployment mechanism to quickly deploy their AWS infrastructures for each of their clients using their SaaS solution.
The Solution
Silicon Overdrive met with Electrum’s team and architected a solution based on AWS best practices to accommodate their customers’ needs and meet their own compliance requirements.
We rearchitected the website, application and database tiers of the environment with the focus on automation. Terraform was used for Infrastructure as Code so that changes could be versioned and Electrum’s new customer environments could be deployed on demand. AWS Config is used to detect configuration drift; and combined with the version history of the IaaS it delivers complete documentation of their environment fulfilling their requirements for ISO 27001 compliance.
Thanks to the DevOps methodologies employed, EC2 instances and the RDS are deployed in high availability. AWS Lambda functions integrate key processes without provisioning or managing servers.
DevOps services used: VPC, IAM, EC2, RDS, S3, ELB, AWS VPN, Lambda, AWS Backup, NAT Gateway, CloudWatch, CloudTrail, Config, Trusted Advisor, Certificate Manager
Third-party apps used: Terraform and Ansible
Project Manager: Charlton Daniels
DaySeven Training
The Challenge
DaySeven Group, who operate across Sub-Saharan Africa, launched a training business in 2016, DaySeven Training, which provides training to professionals looking to further their skillsets in the workplace.
Their mission is to ensure that delegates are provided with the relevant and necessary skills to safeguard their place in the world of business. They have helped over 5,500 professionals in their personal development.
DaySeven Training implemented Moodle, an open-source LMS, as their preferred platform to provide their educators, administrators, and learners with a single robust, secure, and integrated system to create a personalised learning environment.
DaySeven Training elected to run their Moodle environment on AWS, and the initial deployment met all their organisational requirements. As their business scaled and demand increased, their environment could not scale and was running out of capacity, which resulted in frequent downtime and could result in potential data loss.
As an educational institution, DaySeven Training keeps records with the personal information of their learners, so it was imperative to secure this data.
The Solution
Silicon Overdrive’s certified team of AWS engineers met with the DaySeven Training leadership team to understand their short- and long-term goals for their Moodle environment. After the initial engagement, an assessment was done on DaySeven Training’s existing environment.
Silicon Overdrive determined that the architecture did not meet with AWS best practices. We then rearchitected and redeployed the environment to ensure that it could meet the short- and long-term scalability requirements and the security standards DaySeven Training have to adhere to.
The rearchitected environment includes Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) and Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) across Multiple Availability Zones (Multi-AZ).
The new environment also ensures that DaySeven Training achieved a highly available solution, ensuring that their educators, administrators, and learners have uninterrupted access to the Moodle Learning Platform.
Amazon CloudFront (Content Delivery Network) is also being used to cache the application content to South African edge locations for faster delivery of the content to students.
The Outcome
By leveraging AWS’s managed services, DaySeven Training is now able to give their educators, administrators, and learners a secure, scalable, and highly available Moodle Learning Platform.
The Solution
Silicon Overdrive met with the Wits team and architected a solution based on AWS best practices to replace their on-premise hardware with a cloud solution that would meet the needs of their students and staff.
We rehosted their existing BigBlueButton environment to a highly-scalable and secure Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). The new VPC utilizes services like Amazon EC2 to provide secure, resizable compute capacity, Amazon Simple Storage Solution (S3) buckets with encryption features and access management tools for secure, durable and scalable object storage, which we included to reduce storage costs associated with backups.
We also added Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes with encryption features to provide secure, highly available, durable and scalable persistent block storage volumes, for use with Amazon EC2 instances.
Amazon CloudWatch has been added for monitoring, management and alerting and AWS CloudTrail (a service for governance, compliance, operational auditing, and risk auditing of your AWS account) was deployed into the environment.
University of the Witwatersrand - BigBlueButton
About the Client
The University of the Witwatersrand is a multi-campus South African public research university situated in the northern areas of central Johannesburg. It is more commonly known as Wits University or Wits.
In line with the University’s Strategic Plan, the School’s vision is to become a leading centre for education and research in the built environment through using innovative teaching, research and engagement with industry, to address the needs of a transforming society. To meet their vision and ensure that their students and staff have the same experience, regardless of them being on or off-campus, Wits are continuing to invest and embrace new technologies.
The Challenge
Due to Covid-19 and the subsequent nation-wide lockdown, Wits needed to adapt and offer more online training, meetings, and interactions for its staff and students.
Wits decided to use BigBlueButton, a free software web conferencing system for GNU/Linux servers, which they deployed on their on-premise environment. Unfortunately, the on-premise hardware had reached the end of its life (EoL), and so support for it was coming to an end. Another big concern for the University was that the on-premise hardware could not scale to meet the increased work-from-home demand.
Wits had two options: First, invest in new upgraded hardware, which would require a significant upfront capital expense and could have a longer lead-time to deploy; alternatively, Wits could move their BigBlueButton environment to AWS and trade their capital expense for operational expense.
Wits had recently migrated their Sakai LMS to AWS and was happy with the results, so they decided to migrate their BigBlueButton environment to the cloud as well.
The Outcome
By the new BigBlueButton AWS environment can handle over three times more traffic without the performance being affected.
Wits have also reported a significant increase in performance and are saying that the AWS environment is much faster than the on-premise environment was. Due to the layers of security that have been added, Wits can rest assured knowing that their environment is safer than it was before.
African Payment Solutions
The Challenge
African Payment Solutions provides a one-stop-shop for multinational merchants looking to sell, and be paid, online by consumers in Africa. With over 15 years of experience with online payments in Africa, and links to more than 70 banks worldwide, African Payment Solutions is an easy choice for global eCommerce merchants.
As an online payment portal for multinational eCommerce and mCommerce merchants, African Payment Solutions allows millions of consumers across Africa to pay with their chosen in-country local payment method.
Due to African Payment Solutions’ continued growth, their hosting environment, located in data centres in the United States, could no longer accommodate the increasing volume of transactions; thus, the need for a scalable solution became apparent.
Moreover, the African Payment Solutions team was concerned about the security, scalability, reliability, and cost of their hosting environment.
African Payment Solutions found that their current environment deviated from best practices and compliance standards. African Payment Solutions also processes credit card information and online payments, so PCI DSS compliance was required.
They decided to bring in an AWS Consulting Partner (Silicon Overdrive) to assist with the architecture, and migration of their workloads to a secure and compliant AWS environment.
The Solution
Silicon Overdrive met with the African Payment Solution’s team and architected a best practice solution based on the AWS Well-Architected Framework. We architected and deployed the environment with a focus on operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimization, and sustainability.
A scalable, secure, PCI DSS compliant environment was architected and deployed on AWS for African Payment Solutions. The new environment uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), and Lambda functions for compute, Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store), Amazon S3 (Simple Cloud Storage) for storage, and Amazon RDS (Relational Database) and DynamoDB as database solutions.
By architecting the solution to run across multiple availability zones, the environment is now highly available and scalable to ensure continuity of services for their customers. We implemented Amazon RDS to reduce the operation overheads for the African Payment Solutions team and to meet high availability and performance requirements.
The Outcome
African Payment Solutions now has a highly available, auto-scaling, PCI DSS compliant, and highly reliable cloud environment. As the company grows and traffic increases, customers will enjoy a seamless experience and not suffer from performance issues arising from the environment. African Payment Solutions achieved Level 1 PCI DSS compliance.
According to Robin Phillip, one of the African Payment Solutions Directors, “Silicon [Overdrive] have been an amazing support and resource to us in establishing and securing our LekkaPay Payment Gateway in the Amazon Cloud. The Silicon Team were professional, proactive, supportive, exacting, responsive, and facilitated quality delivery of our migration to spec on time. Our tech team found Silicon a pleasure to work with.”
He further shared a compliment from one of his tech team members. “Silicon Overdrive are amazing; we could never have got to where we are today without them – with a deep knowledge of what they do, responsive, approachable, and generally a pleasure to work with. A big thank you to the Silicon Team .[sic]”