SecurityCase Study: Digital Transformation
One of our customers is an innovative IT start-up business based in Brisbane, Australia. Their primary focus is to provide clients with a solution to securely store and share files in the cloud.
The Challenge
The expansion of the business from individuals to organisations and expected demand made it necessary to scale the hosted environment on-demand to meet customer expectations. There were also some challenges with physical equipment redundancy and risk.
The business outcomes the organisation was hoping to achieve include:
- Increased reliability and availability for ‘go-live’ of their product;
- The ability to bid on business without the need to scale the IT infrastructure in advance;
- The potential to enable global coverage and localised user experience;
- To build the company’s reputation in local markets by demonstrating data sovereignty and compliance adherence; and
- To be based on a cost-effective, highly scalable platform with brand recognition.
The Solution
The approach for the transitional phase took the following high-level design objectives into consideration:
- Minimise the changes to the overall topology and infrastructure
- Provide cost estimations for the implemented design prior to deployment
- Obtain a peer review of the design by an Amazon Web Services Solutions architect
- Maintain a high degree of security awareness during the design process
- Validate the security of the built environment prior to customer cutover via penetration.
There was a need to provide testing and reporting on system availability and redundancy along with data backup. The future ability to automatically scale and shrink the supporting environment was also crucial.
Our design looked to minimise the number of deployed components (moving parts) and to simplify and automate ongoing management and scalability. Since security was integral to our customer’s service offering, it was critical to ensure the environment was designed with security in its DNA and validated through external independent penetration testing.
Venn IT performed the major phases of transition and transformation as two separate projects. The transition project was to de-risk the current environment; the transformational project was to design in such a way as to achieve the true benefits of cloud hosting.
Benefits
Even though the costs for the new platform are comparable for a like-for-like comparison, the main impact on the revenue will result from the ability to scale, agility, flexibility and reliability. The potential to gain larger projects represents a significant revenue opportunity for our client.
