Case Study: Designing and implementing a scalable AWS solution for a financial company
THE CLIENT
Financial Enterprise (confidential)
THE CHALLENGE
Facing the need to build a secure and scalable AWS infrastructure, a financial company sought kloudr’s expertise, as they aimed to navigate AWS complexities, comply with strict financial regulations, and enhance cybersecurity defenses.
THE OBJECTIVES
The primary objectives for the customer’s engagement with kloudr were clearly defined:
- Establish an AWS Landing Zone to create a highly scalable infrastructure, implement AI services, and integrate a legally binding signature solution.
- Obtain comprehensive managed services for the newly implemented solution, including proactive monitoring, governance, compliance, 24/7 support, and cost management.
- Entrust kloudr with the ongoing management and optimization of the infrastructure as the business continues to grow.
- Continuously optimize the cost-efficiency, ensuring that the infrastructure remains cost-effective while delivering top-tier performance.
THE SOLUTION
In this AWS landing zone solution, the core architecture revolves around hosting an application on Amazon EC2 instances orchestrated through an Auto Scaling Group. These EC2 instances efficiently share data among themselves using Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) while also storing important data in Amazon S3 buckets. For database management, we’ve opted for Amazon Aurora RDS (Relational Database Service) due to its exceptional performance, scalability, and high availability features.
kloudr chose Amazon Aurora RDS for its high performance and low-latency read and write operations, making it ideal for applications with stringent database requirements. In addition, synchronous replication of the database is implemented across multiple Availability Zones, ensuring data durability and fault tolerance. This synchronous replication means that updates to the database are immediately replicated to a secondary instance, ensuring data consistency and minimizing the risk of data loss in case of a primary instance failure.
To further enhance resilience and disaster recovery capabilities, this architecture includes multiple environments. There’s a production environment, a test environment, and a disaster recovery (DR) environment deployed in a different AWS region. This multi-region setup ensures that in the event of a regional failure, the application can be quickly restored and continued from the DR environment, providing business continuity.
To ensure robust security, kloudr employed a third-party Web Application Firewall (WAF) provider to protect against web-based threats. The infrastructure is further enhanced with an AWS Virtual Private Network (VPN) for secure communication, NAT Gateways for controlled internet access, AWS Rekognition for advanced image and video analysis, AWS Textract for automated document text extraction, and a third-party eSignature solution to streamline document signing processes.
To maintain visibility and ensure operational excellence, logs and metrics are continuously streamed to a monitoring system, which also integrates with Amazon Kinesis for log aggregation and forwarding to a Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solution for real-time security information and event management. Comprehensive security measures include the deployment of AWS Firewall, AWS Security Hub for centralized security management, an anti-malware solution, and a DDoS protection plan to safeguard the entire infrastructure. This holistic approach ensures the reliability, scalability, and security of the AWS-based application hosting environment, across multiple regions for enhanced resilience.
kloudr’s role extended to ensuring cost-efficient scalability to manage fluctuating workloads, providing AI-specific expertise for data-driven insights, and guaranteeing uninterrupted services with high availability and disaster recovery solutions.
This partnership empowers the financial institution to concentrate on core operations while reaping the benefits of a secure, compliant, and resilient AWS infrastructure primed for AI service integration.
THE RESOURCES
kloudr leveraged a wide range of AWS and Managed Services resources to deliver a comprehensive solution:
Main AWS & Business Apps:
- Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) Instances
- Auto Scaling Group
- Amazon Elastic File System (EFS)
- Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) Buckets
- Amazon Aurora RDS (Relational Database Service)
- Third-party Web Application Firewall (WAF) provider
- AWS Virtual Private Network (VPN)
- NAT Gateway
- AWS Rekognition
- AWS Textract
- Third-party eSignature solution
- Monitoring System
- Amazon Kinesis
- Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solution
- AWS Firewall
- AWS Security Hub
- Anti-malware solution
- DDoS protection plan
Managed Services:
- Proactive monitoring
- Governance & Compliance
- 24x7x365 support
- Cost Management
THE RESULTS
The collaboration between the customer and kloudr produced remarkable results:
- Solution Implementation: kloudr successfully designed and implemented a scalable AWS solution that met the customer’s immediate and long-term needs.
- Managed Services: With kloudr’s managed services, the customer has access to proactive monitoring, governance, compliance, 24/7 support, and cost management, ensuring the solution’s ongoing success.
