AWS
Amazon Web Services
As an AWS Premier Partner, we provide AWS cloud infrastructure managed services including architecting, migration, security, maintenance and monitoring of your AWS environments with a security and compliance emphasis.
We are qualified and fully accredited Premier AWS Consulting, Channel Reseller and Public Sector Partners. We are also AWS Well-Architected Partners and Amazon EC2 for Windows Server Delivery Partners.
As an AWS Public Sector Partner, we have the experience and expertise to assist Government, Education, Healthcare, and Not for Profit organizations in the public sector community.
Go Serverless with AWS
By leveraging serverless architecture with AWS, Silicon Overdrive can help your business to build and deploy applications that scale. With a serverless environment, there is no infrastructure to manage, you can bring your own code, lower your operational costs, and rest assured knowing that your application will be highly available and will auto-scale.
What is AWS?
Why Silicon Overdrive?
Consultancy
Our AWS team of certified Architect, SysOps and Dev consultants will assess your needs and provide expertise and optimised solutions to meet your business requirements.
Assessments
Our team will assess your existing cloud infrastructures for opportunities for improvement, cost optimisation and alignment with best practices and security standards.
Development
Our AWS certified Development teams are available to assist your team migrate to AWS or develop your applications for AWS.
Funding & Benefits
As AWS Channel Partners we offer our customers the option to be invoiced by us in ZAR for AWS usage. No credit card required. Cost savings and, if eligible, access to Proof-of-Concept (POC) credits to facilitate or accelerate AWS adoption or projects.
Security & Compliance
Our services include security and compliance, with significant expertise and experience in assisting customers to secure their cloud infrastructure and to achieve and maintain compliance.
Architecting & Migration
We provide customers with guideline AWS architectures, inclusive of usage estimates, optimised for their requirements, for free. These architecture guidelines are based on AWS and security best practices. Our teams build out and assist customers with migration to scalable, highly available, secure and optimised AWS infrastructure.
Monitoring & Maintenance
AWS has a shared Security and Compliance responsibility model. We provide customers with fully Managed Services, inclusive of maintenance, monitoring and alerting, patch management, security hardening and related services, relieving customers of this operational burden.
Cost Optimisation & Management
We continually analyse your AWS usage, optimise your architecture and implement controls to deliver cost saving. CloudHealth is available to our customers free-of-charge. CloudHealth performs cost, best practice and security analysis and reporting for optimisation and management.
AWS Case Studies
Electrum Payments
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. To become this force in their industry, Electrum needed infrastructure that could scale to meet the demands of their increasing client base and that would allow them to create a gateway switch for Electrum’s enterprise clients to engage with their clients, 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 and CloudFront for delivering content.
The Outcome
Following the deployment of their infrastructure in AWS, with the guidance and assistance of Silicon Overdrive’s AWS team, Electrum deployed an enhanced USSD for banks and have since successfully converted their environment from Infrastructure as a Service to Software as a Service, thereby increasing their turnover and profitability. They now process billions of transactions, in milliseconds, per annum and provide their customers with 99.999% uptime.
Silicon Overdrive also assisted with the implementation of Value Added Service (VAS) systems for Electrum’s large retail clients (airtime, entertainment and travel tickets from their stores). Silicon Overdrive continues to provide technical assistance in building out their 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 were 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
Silicon Overdrive’s AWS certified engineers met with PayGate to map out a solution which would cover all of their requirements. Silicon Overdrive proposed that PayGate’s environments should be rebuilt on AWS and implement segregation, allowing them to deploy servers securely for each role. Moving PayGate’s infrastructure to AWS would ensure that their environment would adhere to best practice security and compliance standards and, as PayGate would only pay for what they use with AWS, Silicon Overdrive was able to present a solution which would also be cost effective.
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
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 Silicon Overdrive team worked closely with the Wits and AWS Public Sector teams to architect and implement a secure, fault-tolerant and highly-available solution.
By implementing Sakai LMS using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) and Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) across Multiple Availability Zones (Multi-AZ), the University achieved a highly available solution, ensuring that Wits students and staff have uninterrupted access to the Sakai LMS.
Amazon CloudFront (Content Delivery Network) is used to cache the Sakai application content to South African edge locations for the fast delivery of the content to students.
Furthermore, the University wanted to reduce the data costs for students accessing Sakai from home, so the University approached the local Mobile Operators to zero-rate these data charges.
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.
Read more about this case study on Intelligent CIO.
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 crowdfunding, 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
FlexPay now operates a secure, compliant and reliable Magento-based environment, capable of supporting their business and budgetary requirements. Silicon Overdrive worked closely with FlexPay’s team to ensure a smooth, efficient and seamless migration from their legacy system to their new environment. Silicon Overdrive continues to support FlexPay’s environment.
DaySeven Group
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.