CLOUD BRIDGE CASE STUDY
Enhancing Resilience and Security in AWS Architecture for Go WorkHorse
Surrey-based firm Go WorkHorse required a secure, resilient order and inventory management app hosted on AWS which would be highly customisable to each individual client. The app is tailored to address your business productivity challenges and capture the data you need in any language.
The productivity SaaS business design and build software solutions which aim to improve SME productivity by giving them access to powerful, yet affordable business management tools which are tailored to their needs.
As happens over time, the AWS tools and services improve, or new features are released. Go WorkHorse approached Cloud Bridge to request that our AWS Experts perform a redesign of the architecture to provide more security & resilience. The brief was to look at the existing app design, and based upon our experience, knowledge and understanding of AWS Services, offer proposals to improve the environment. The recommendations should focus initially on resilience, but also offer suggestions around security, cost optimisation or other best practices.
The challenge
Taking the initial brief, our architects performed a review of the existing AWS account and provided detailed feedback. The feedback was a report which focussed upon a number of key areas and was prioritised based upon the overall urgency or seriousness of the findings.
Our report highlighted a number of areas where we felt that improvements could be made to increase the security standing of resources, as well as options for adopting more cloud-native features to improve the scalability, resilience and responsiveness of the architecture. Specifically, some of our recommendations covered:
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Tightening up EC2 Security Groups to lower the attack surface of public facing resources.
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Introducing new AWS products and features to help in logging, monitoring and alerting.
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Adding more resources to allow for better resilience of the application
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Usage of auto-scaling technologies to allow systems to increase or decrease available resources based upon demand.
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Taking our 24 x 7 managed service to ensure the app and customer was supported when they needed it
The solution
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Improved monitoring, logging and alerting meant that the customer had much improved visibility of the health of their environment and are able to deal with any faults or issues faster.
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The customer’s systems are now scalable and resilient, where increased customer demand no longer risks introducing latency, and unplanned outages no longer result in system unavailability
The benefits
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The prime benefit of our work was no doubt the improved resiliency and security of the the customers systems, which vastly reduced the opportunities for someone to adversely impact the company’s main assets, either deliberately or by accident.
“Cloud Bridge’s methodical approach to analysing our current architecture and comparing against the 5 pillars of the well architected framework gave us confidence we were working with the right partner. The follow up support services gave us peace of mind knowing we have experts at hand when we need them”
Alan James – Managing Director