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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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Customer Reviews
Thokozani Dlamini Read More
Excellent understanding of Aws architecture and platform. They also have good systems knowledge and they executed our migration to the cloud with a clear project plan. Their project management skills and interpersonal skills were second to none.
Luzuko Mhlakela Read More
Since we've started with Silicon Overdrive the service has been exceptional, my partner and I are both non technical people and the team at Silicon Overdrive has shown us great patience in ensuring we understand the migration process, best practices, benefits of being with AWS walking us through the technical jargon and have also displayed immense dedication to our start-up working with us after hours as the guys on our technical team work day jobs and are only available after hours.
Rolan Christian Read More
Silicon Overdrive has proven themselves as a very competent AWS partner that has delivered high quality solutions to CareConnect. They have also assisted CareConnect to optimise their AWS usage spend and recover costs where not needed, as part of our maintenance agreement with them. They have also shown great flexibility to support us, when dealing with our requirements and budget limitations. The only area of improvement that we believe Silicon Overdrive needs to focus on is growing their resource base to create more capacity.
Martin Rose Read More
Silicon Overdrive were very professional in their proposal and implementation of the designed architecture. There were a number of adhoc changes that were required and they were very willing to help and accommodate those along with advice on best practice.
Ian Barnes Read More
Silicon Overdrive has impressed us with its service levels from the day we commenced our relationship. Their understanding of AWS products and services, combined with the brilliance and efficiency in setting up the project was matched by the excellent communication and guidance we received. Would use them again in a heart beat as well as recommend them to anyone needing assistance in this regard.
Mamello Mofokeng Read More
This was truly an incredible experience from start to finish. The Overdrive team went out of it's way to ensure that we understood every step that was taken and all the best processes and best practice techniques. They were thorough and patient and ensured that we understood each method and technique that was used for the project. We really loved working with the team and highly recommend their services. We plan on continuing our journey with them in the near future.
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LUMA Law
About the Customer
LUMA Law is an innovative legal services provider committed to simplifying the legal landscape for individuals in South Africa. With a strong focus on accessibility and affordability, LUMA Law offers a range of online legal services.
These services are designed to create convenience and champion the legal outcomes citizens deserve.
LUMA Law’s dedication to increasing access to justice empowers individuals to make informed legal decisions and navigate the complexities of the law with confidence.
The Challenge
As part of their services, LUMA Law offers LUMABot, a user-friendly AI-powered legal chatbot providing free legal information and answers to basic legal questions, and access to qualified legal professionals for efficient and cost-effective legal assistance.
LUMA Law had a requirement to put additional guardrails and processes in place to improve their customer offering and better align themselves with AWS Cloud best practices.
The Solution
LUMA Law contacted Silicon Overdrive, an AWS Advanced Partner, to conduct a Well-Architected Framework Review (WAFR).
The AWS Well-Architected Framework is a set of best practices for designing and operating reliable, secure, efficient, and cost-effective systems in the cloud. It provides a consistent approach to evaluate architectures and implement scalable designs. The framework is built around six pillars: operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimization, and sustainability. Together with the LUMA Law’s technical team, Operational Excellence and Security were identified as focus areas.
The Operational Excellence pillar prioritizes continually running and monitoring systems to deliver business value, including best practices for using AWS CloudWatch. AWS CloudWatch is a monitoring and observability service that helps you collect and track metrics, collect and monitor log files, and set alarms. It is a critical tool for maintaining operational efficiency and ensuring LUMA Law’s AWS resources perform as expected. These best practices ensure LUMA Law’s AWS environment is reliable, resilient, and effectively managed and monitored to meet business needs.
By addressing the Security pillar, the customer can implement further security safeguards to improve their security and compliance. It encompasses best practices related to AWS Identity Access Management (IAM), data protection, network security, monitoring, and incident response. Security remediations involved identifying and addressing security vulnerabilities and weaknesses in LUMA Law’s AWS architecture. This, in turn, enhanced their overall security posture through patching vulnerabilities, implementing security policies, and responding to security incidents.
A Trend Micro Cloud One – Conformity assessment was conducted to identify any areas of improvement and risk. The Silicon Overdrive Team implemented the identified improvements and additional security safeguards to improve their POPIA, GDPR, and ISO 27001 compliance.
Further to the above, we helped optimize the LUMA Law legal chatbot, which is powered by Amazon Lex. Silicon Overdrive implemented an Amazon CloudWatch dashboard to visualize activity and interactions between LUMA Law’s chatbot and their customers.
The Outcome
LUMA Law gained valuable insights into AWS Cloud management and system operations through the Well-Architected Framework Review process.
The customer also acquired a deeper understanding of workload management aligned with their business objectives, improving their cloud operations and management, security and compliance.
Grace Gichanga, Founder of LUMA Law, said, “The team executed their mandate with professionalism and efficiency. They understood the present and future needs of the business and went above and beyond to deliver a platform that exceeded all expectations.”
The Challenge
PrivIQ had a requirement to host a dedicated environment for PrivIQ SA, making use of PrivIQ’s Data Privacy Compliance services in the AWS Cape Town region to meet PrivIQ SA’s data localization requirements.
In response to this requirement, PrivIQ engaged Silicon Overdrive, an AWS Advanced Partner, to facilitate the seamless deployment of their applications and workloads to the AWS Cape Town region.
PrivIQ SA
About the Customer
PrivIQ is a leading developer of data privacy management software designed to build trust between organizations and their stakeholders.
Founded in 2018 and headquartered in the Netherlands, PrivIQ offers an intuitive platform that makes managing privacy simple for organizations of all sizes.
Key features include:
- Global privacy regulation coverage
- Integrated Record of Processing Activities
- Data mapping functionality
- Risk assessments to prioritize compliance efforts
- Workflow tools to manage subject access requests and data breaches
- Integration capabilities to embed privacy into business processes
- User-friendly interface requiring no prior legal expertise
- AOSphere RuleFinder integration
PrivIQ’s technology and partners’ advisory services enable responsible data practices that respect privacy. By making privacy an accessible and affordable default, PrivIQ helps organizations demonstrate trustworthiness to customers and regulators.
To learn more about PrivIQ’s offerings, visit www.priviq.com. Discover how PrivIQ’s platform can simplify privacy management and compliance for your organization.
The Solution
Silicon Overdrive replicated the AWS environment to a new dedicated AWS account in the AWS Cape Town region for PrivIQ SA. We architected the environment to be highly secure, available, scalable and compliant.
We leveraged several AWS managed and serverless services to address PrivIQ SA’ challenges, including Auto Scaling with AWS Fargate, Amazon Aurora, and Amazon Cognito.
Silicon Overdrive implemented AWS Fargate containers in an HA (High Availability) configuration to ensure availability and continuity of PrivIQ SA’s applications and services. High Availability systems play a crucial role in maintaining continuous functionality, as technology and networks can encounter disruptions or server errors from time to time.
By distributing the containers across multiple Availability Zones, PrivIQ’s solution can efficiently route traffic and workload to healthy instances, minimizing downtime and ensuring uninterrupted service availability.
Silicon Overdrive deployed Amazon Aurora, a powerful, fully managed database service that offered high availability, scalability, and enhanced performance. Amazon Aurora also provides various security features, including network isolation, encryption at rest, and encryption in transit.
To simplify user authentication and authorization, Silicon Overdrive implemented Amazon Cognito. This service allows PrivIQ customers to manage end-user identities, create authentication flows, and control access to their application efficiently.
In addition, Silicon Overdrive deployed AWS Transit Gateway, an essential tool for improving security in an AWS environment by providing centralized network management, control, and monitoring. This prevents users from directly accessing AWS accounts, supporting best practice security measures.
Other services are utilized to improve the security and compliance of the environment, such as Web Application Firewall (WAF) to reduce the number of attacks and vulnerabilities. Amazon GuardDuty to monitor AWS account and services vulnerabilities; Amazon CloudWatch for alerting, monitoring, and logging purposes; AWS CloudTrail for detailed event logging and monitoring for your AWS resources and services.
The Outcome
Silicon Overdrive successfully migrated the workload for PrivIQ SA to the Cape Town region within three weeks, where it is currently running in a highly available and secure, scalable, compliant environment. PrivIQ’s solution now meets PrivIQ SA’s data localization, security and availability requirements.
GirlCode
About the Customer
GirlCode is a registered NPO empowering young girls and women through technology. As an organization, they are committed to advancing the principles of Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment (BBBEE) and are proud to be recognized as a level 1 BBBEE contributor.
The powerful women-owned business is on a mission to empower 10 million women and girls by 2030, by creating a network of women who are highly skilled in software development and leadership skills and who will contribute towards an inclusive and innovative technology industry.
The Challenge
Following their migration to AWS, GirlCode needed an AWS Well-Architected Partner to conduct an AWS Well-Architected Framework Review (WAFR) on their cloud-hosted environments, focusing on reducing operational costs.
The Well-Architected Framework provides architectural best practices for designing and operating secure, reliable, efficient, cost-effective, and sustainable workloads in the AWS Cloud.
It provides a way for organizations to consistently measure their architecture against six pillars, namely, Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, Cost Optimization, and Sustainability, to identify areas for improvement.
The Solution
Recognizing the need to address these challenges, GirlCode engaged Silicon Overdrive to undergo an AWS Well-Architected Framework Review. The Review aimed to identify areas of improvement around cost savings within their existing cloud architecture.
Within the broader review, Silicon Overdrive’s team also conducted a detailed cost optimization assessment. This assessment delved into the organization’s AWS resource utilization, spending patterns, and opportunities for cost savings.
Silicon Overdrive identified over-provisioned instances, which were subsequently right-sized of AWS services utilized according to actual usage patterns based on metrics. This optimization strategy resulted in resource allocation that was more closely aligned with workload requirements.
Silicon Overdrive also identified and categorized the baseline workloads and implemented AWS Savings Plans and Reserved Instances (RIs) to achieve significantly discounted pricing.
The Review also encouraged the implementation of tagging and cost attribution practices, which led to providing granular insights into GirlCode’s AWS resource usage and spending.
Tagging involves adding metadata, or “tags,” to resources such as EC2 instances, RDS (Relational Database Service) databases, S3 buckets, and more. Tags provided additional context about each resource, including ownership, purpose, and environment. Tags emerged as a powerful tool for categorizing and organizing resources effectively.
Throughout the process, various other operational improvements were identified and implemented, including setting up CloudWatch alerts, automating responses to events, rotating access keys, and periodically reviewing IAM (Identity Access Management) user access, among other actions.
The Outcome
The AWS Well-Architected Framework Review, with a focus on cost optimization, empowered GirlCode to make data-driven decisions, streamline AWS resource allocation, and optimize costs without compromising on performance.
As GirlCode continues its mission to empower young girls and women through technology, it does so with the knowledge that its cloud infrastructure is as efficient as its cause is impactful.
Zandile Mkwanazi, Founder and CEO of GirlCode, said: “The team was fantastic, they offered a great level of support and communication throughout the project implementation. I believe they went above and beyond to facilitate the successful implementation of the project.”
EasyCrypto
About the Customer
EasyCrypto, a subsidiary of Purple Group Limited, a notable JSE-listed financial services company, is at the forefront of modern investing. They offer a secure, intelligent platform that empowers users to invest in Crypto Assets.
This innovative platform enables users to diversify their portfolios across various crypto assets, minimizing risk and ensuring a smooth and secure experience.
The Challenge
EasyCrypto migrated their platform to Amazon Web Services (AWS). They needed to align their architecture with their parent company, Purple Group Limited. To address this, EasyCrypto enlisted the expertise of Silicon Overdrive, an AWS Advanced Partner.
An AWS Well-Architected Framework Review (WAFR) was conducted to evaluate the state of their applications and workloads against AWS architectural best practices, identify opportunities for improvement, and track their progress over time. Their architecture was evaluated against the framework’s six pillars namely, operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimization, and sustainability.
There was also a need to further improve their applications and workloads, to align them with AWS best practices. As a result, they would build the most secure, high-performing, resilient, and efficient infrastructure possible for their applications.
EasyCrypto also aimed to improve reliability, meet global scaling requirements, and improve cloud security as part of their strategic objectives.
The Solution
EasyCrypto’s required alignment to best practices both from an AWS Well Architected Framework as well as the Purple Group Parent Company policy perspective. To enable this, Silicon Overdrive migrated their workload to a new best practice AWS account created from their parent company’s AWS Control Tower. In doing so, they achieved alignment to be best practices and agreed guardrails and policies enforced by their parent organization.
Furthermore, during the migration, improvements identified during the Well Architected Framework Review were implemented. Silicon Overdrive were also able to provide further views on operational improvements based on the outcome of the assessment. Silicon Overdrive used a combination of knowledge, experience, and toolsets to confidently deliver the workload to the highest degrees of PCI DSS compliance while also ensuring the highest levels of elasticity and cost efficiency.
By leveraging AWS Features such as Auto Scaling Group that ensure the highest elasticity and cost efficiency level, they can monitor their applications and automatically adjust capacity to maintain steady, predictable performance at the lowest possible cost.
Amazon Elastic Load Balancer (ELB), was also installed to efficiently distribute incoming traffic across multiple targets, including EC2 instances, containers, and IP addresses, across Availability Zones.
Scalability and availability were improved to ensure continuity of service. AWS RDS MySQL was setup in multi-AZ to enable high resiliency to outages. Further use of AWS Web Application Firewall provided additional layer of managed security in addition to the use of AWS Secrets Manager, KMS and Certificate Manager.
The Outcome
Since the migration, EasyCrypto has been able to operate their workload at the highest levels of availability and performance at the lowest possible cost.
Outages result in automatic failover without the intervention of technical staff or impact to users, enabling the company to focus on new features for their product instead of keeping the lights on. User experience has improved substantially due to elasticity and effective load balancing that ensures resources are made available during periods of high load.
Cost is optimized as resources are scaled back when load subsides to normal levels. This has enabled EasyCrypto to ensure that they are able to meet the demands as they expand their customer base.
By incorporating security features into the development and design of their applications, they met AWS Security’s best practices such as using permissions boundaries to delegate permissions, applying least-privilege permissions, and rotation of access keys to mention a few.
Don Kruger, Product Development Lead, said, “At EasyCrypto we are well on our way to realize our dream of achieving our business goals through the power of AWS cloud computing. The day is arriving soon when will be offering our offering to consumers anywhere and anytime globally. We are thankful for the partnership and support of Silicon Overdrive in our journey, their deep AWS knowledge and expertise have been invaluable.”
Inclusivity Solutions
About the Customer
Inclusivity Solutions is an African insurtech driven by a mission to bridge the growing global insurance gap.
Through innovative digital and embedded insurance solutions, they empower insurance and distribution partners to embark on a transformative digital journey, placing their customers at the center.
What sets them apart is their unique blend of actuarial expertise, data analytics capabilities, an award-winning technology platform, and deep knowledge of digital insurance in emerging markets.
Inclusivity Solutions is a global company with a consumer-centric approach, delivering locally rooted solutions that create both social impact and financial sustainability. Their core purpose revolves around safeguarding and improving the quality of life for vulnerable individuals through digital insurance solutions.
The Challenge
Inclusivity Solutions operates in a highly regulated Fintech industry, collaborating with partners who are equally bound by stringent data protection and security regulations. The constant stream of partner inquiries regarding infrastructure compliance posed a significant challenge.
Given their startup status, these challenges were expected. To address them, the management team leveraged their available AWS (Amazon Web Services) credits and sought guidance from Silicon Overdrive, a well-established AWS Advanced Partner.
Following initial introductions and sharing of challenges, they embarked on an AWS Well-Architected Framework Review (WAFR) of their AWS infrastructure. This Framework provides a comprehensive set of architectural best practices for designing secure, reliable, efficient, cost-effective, and sustainable workloads in the AWS Cloud.
The Framework offers a structured approach to assess the architecture of cloud-based applications, pinpoint improvement areas, and provide optimization recommendations.
With Silicon Overdrive taking the lead, a collaborative journey commenced with the Inclusivity Solutions team. A Trend Micro conformity assessment served as the starting point to identify high-risk areas and vulnerabilities.
Throughout the process, Silicon Overdrive ensured that the Inclusivity Solutions team was well-informed and comfortable with each step.
The Solution
The first and foremost concern was security. Silicon Overdrive implemented robust measures to mitigate risks and improve Inclusivity Solutions’ security posture.
The reliability pillar focused on identifying potential points of failure in the organization’s architecture, aiming for a more dependable system with minimal downtime.
Efficiency was next on the list. The goal was to optimize cloud resources, reduce costs, and enhance operational efficiency.
The AWS best practices framework ensured better alignment with organizational objectives, facilitating the effective achievement of business goals while maintaining consistent standards in evaluating and optimizing cloud architecture.
Being a rapidly growing startup, Inclusivity Solutions needed systems designed for scalability to accommodate changes in client demand as they deployed across Africa and beyond.
Cost optimization was another focal point, identifying areas for resource reduction to achieve cost savings.
Inclusivity Solutions has taken steps to protect its data by implementing privacy controls, which restrict access to authorized staff for sensitive data only. Encryption ensures that even if unauthorized access occurs, the data remains unreadable. The new enforced privacy policies help define how data is collected, processed, and used within the organization. This includes compliance with data protection regulations such as GDPR or HIPAA.
The Outcome
Inclusivity Solutions’ objective was to align its IT infrastructure with industry best practices.
Implementing the AWS Well-Architected Framework allowed them to achieve this and instilled the confidence needed to focus on business growth and keep their partners satisfied. It created an environment that safeguarded client data, improved security and ensured compliance with global data protection standards.
As a startup, they viewed this process as an opportunity for knowledge acquisition and learning, and as a validation that the platform was built in line with global best practice with the added benefit of reassuring partners that they had implemented required security safeguards, and improved compliance.
Chaddy Rungwe, Head of Engineering at Inclusivity Solutions, said, “Partnering with Silicon Overdrive was more than just a solution-seeking endeavor. It was a transformative journey of learning, understanding, and fortifying. Through their in-depth knowledge and proficiency with AWS services, they not only strengthened our security measures but illuminated the path to environmentally conscious and cost-effective infrastructure management. We now stand confident in our IT prowess, poised to offer our partners and consumers a service built upon a bedrock of trust and excellence.”
GLU Global
About the Customer
GLU Global is a team of highly experienced business and system integration specialists who love solving challenges and making an impact. They help their clients to cut the cost of delivering impactful solutions using their No Code, industry agnostic, enterprise integration platform – GLU.Ware.
The GLU.Ware platform is the culmination of GLU’s collective 100+ years of Integration experience gained in emerging market environments. Integration is the catalyst of innovation with GLU.Ware enabling ‘Innovation at Speed’. It empowers Enterprises with an ability to innovate and to be more digitally agile than their competition.
The Challenge
GLU contacted Silicon Overdrive, an Amazon Web Services Advanced Partner, to conduct an AWS Well-Architected Framework Review of GLU’s AWS setup. The Framework provides architectural best practices for designing and operating secure, reliable, efficient, cost-effective, and sustainable workloads in the AWS Cloud.
It provides a way for organizations to consistently measure their architecture against best practices and to identify areas for improvement. The GLU team required the Well-Architected Framework Review (WAFR) to evaluate and improve their AWS cloud infrastructure to ensure its alignment with industry best practices. This AWS WARF process represents an important step in GLU’s due diligence discipline, which aims to ensure continuous improvement in GLU’s governance, security, compliance, scalability and operations posture.
The Solution
Silicon Overdrive conducted the WAFR to evaluate GLU’s AWS environment against the six WAFR pillars of operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimization and sustainability.
Silicon Overdrive and the GLU team implemented improvements to address the key items discovered during the Review. An improved Disaster Recovery, Backup and Restore Policy was defined based on GLU recovery objectives and improvements implemented to their backup and restore processes.
Amazon CloudWatch was implemented to improve the reliability and efficiency of GLU’s AWS environments. Amazon CloudWatch monitors GLU’s AWS resources and the applications they run in real time. CloudWatch collects and tracks metrics to measure and improve resource utilization visualized through custom dashboards.
Additional AWS Security and Compliance Services such as AWS Config were implemented to improve security posture and to meet compliance requirements. AWS Config enables GLU to assess, audit, and evaluate configurations of their resources.
GLU also implemented numerous enhancements to optimize and improve system performance, scalability and reliability.
The Outcome
Silicon Overdrive recommendations were based on the results from the Well-Architected Framework Review, and the remediations assisted GLU to improve their AWS Cloud setup by ensuring its alignment to AWS best practices and design principles for overall reliability, security and compliance.
Silicon Overdrive’s technical due diligence process when conducting a Well Architected Framework Review, includes running conformity assessments which enables GLU to view their compliance status and act on threats with immediacy. Through this process, GLU achieved high ISO 27001, PCI-DSS and GDPR compliance scores within a short period of time.
The use of Amazon CloudWatch enables GLU to optimize the way their clients interact with the GLU.Ware platform. AWS Config provides GLU with optimized change management controls as decisions can be based on real-time information. GLU now has advanced monitoring and logging systems that provide a single view of their environments.
Operational efficiency has been improved as the Advanced Audit dashboard provides GLU with a single view of how their infrastructure is performing empowering an ability for real-time actions to be taken.
Improvements that have increased system performance efficiency have also led to operational cost optimization through Compute right sizing.
Richard Price, Senior DevOps Manager at GLU Global said: “It was a pleasure to partner with Silicon Overdrive; they have been professional and knowledgeable about AWS architecture. The Well Architected Framework Review has enabled us to improve efficiencies and be more in control of our environment at all times. GLU now has an even more robust offering to gain entry to new markets as well as improving our existing client capabilities thanks to our enhanced and modernized AWS infrastructure.”
“Strong leadership is the true cornerstone of any organization. This is a true reflection experienced working with Richard and his team at GLU Global. The six pillars of the WAFR and implementation thereof was successful due to the buy in of Richard and all the teams involved,” said Charlton Daniels, AWS Migrations Director at Silicon Overdrive.
Hi.com
About the Customer
Hi.com is a Startup company that aims to provide the world’s first universal cross-ecosystem payment and financial services platform for its users. They have over 100 employees in offices across Europe and Asia. Members of the Hi.com community have access to a next-gen crypto exchange and mobile banking app, for savings, investments and payments. Hi.com is a gateway to Web3, including wealth, social networking, entertainment and retail services, which can be experienced in both the real world and the Metaverse.
The Challenge
Hi.com customers are allowed to pay using custom fiat and crypto debit card at any of Mastercard’s 90 million merchants worldwide. Users can trade, save or transact in Crypto currency. They needed to achieve PCI DSS compliance to ensure a high level of security and compliance to allow them to process card payments.
The Solution
Silicon Overdrive assisted Hi.com to architect secure, high-performing, resilient, scalable and efficient AWS infrastructures for their workloads. It was essential to implement security controls according to PCI DSS standards. As a part of the solution, all workloads were architected in a decoupled manner.
AWS managed services and serverless services were used to achieve operational efficiency and help achieve PCI DSS compliance.
Services like AWS ECS Fargate were leveraged as they feature automatic scaling, built-in high availability, and a pay-for-use billing model to increase agility and optimize costs. AWS ECS Fargate removed the operational overhead from the Hi.com team of scaling, patching, securing, and managing servers.
With Hi.com leveraging Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), inefficient and time-consuming database administrative tasks were removed. Amazon Relational Database Service made it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. It provided cost-efficient and resizable capacity while automating time-consuming administration tasks such as hardware provisioning, database setup, patching and backups. This could be achieved without needing to provision infrastructure or maintain software. Hi.com’s databases were now built for business-critical workloads, offering high availability, reliability, and security.
Hi.com could reduce risk as they scaled by using AWS security automation and activity monitoring services to detect suspicious security events, like configuration changes, across their AWS workloads.
By integrating AWS managed services, they streamline their operations, secure their workloads, simplify PCI DSS compliance reporting and reduce their costs. AWS Security Hub was leveraged to automate security checks and centralize alerts and resolutions with automated response and remediation actions.
A variety of AWS and DevOps services were used to architect a secure, reliable and compliant hosting platform in the cloud for their PCI DSS application were Amazon VPC, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), Amazon S3, AWS ECS Fargate, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS), AWS Security Hub, AWS Config, Amazon CloudWatch, AWS CloudTrail, AWS Trusted Advisor, Amazon Route 53, AWS Virtual Private Network (VPN), AWS Cloud Development Kit, AWS CloudFormation, AWS Certificate Manager and Amazon GuardDuty.
The Outcome
By leveraging AWS Services in scope of the PCI DSS AWS assurance program Hi.com was able to achieve PCI DSS Level 1 compliance, within three months of engaging with Silicon Overdrive. Hi.com achieved a secure, scalable and highly available and cost-efficient architecture.
“Thank you so much for paving the way on the AWS platform in order for us to achieve our PCI DSS, your service delivery was stellar.” was the comment made by Alec Erasmus, the Technical Visionary and Strategist Bleeding-edge Technologist Investments and Payments Expert at Hi.com.
MyRunway
Magento AWS Migration
About the Customer
MyRunway, an online fashion retailer was created to assist the online shopping society find fashion apparel with ease.
In partnership with over 500 high-end brands, MyRunway strives to give its members access to the latest fashion at discounted prices – all from a single online portal.
Members are kept updated on the latest offers via email and the MyRunway app as well as their social media platforms. This way members are seen as part of an exclusive society and never miss out on the latest fashion trends from their favorite brands!
The Challenge
MyRunway was challenged by existing legacy issues and downtime on the website. The Head of Technology, Anel Klynsmith’s vision was to create a frictionless online customer journey from search all through to checkout, powered by a system that is ‘always-on.’
Although MyRunway’s infrastructure was spread across various AWS accounts, it was not aligned to AWS Well-Architected Framework’s best practice.
The Silicon Overdrive team was seconded to advise on a solution that would prevent downtime and minimize business disruptions using the AWS Well-Architected Framework’s best practice.
The Solution
After various discovery workshops, Silicon Overdrive recommended that MyRunway redeploy its applications and services onto a single consolidated AWS account and adopt an architecture that offered high availability, scalability and improved security enhancements.
The Outcome
Silicon Overdrive redeployed the newly designed solution into one consolidated production account with monitoring, alerting and self-healing. The Trend Cloud Conformity results achieved high PCI-DSS, ISO 27001 and GDPR scores which followed AWS best practices.
With the rebranding from RunwaySale to MyRunway some of the previously utilized services on AWS were modernized for EC2 moved to ECS Fargate, thus reducing the overall operational overhead by removing the need to perform regular maintenance patching.
Amazon S3 made it possible to retain millions of images through the MyRunway website and application. The use of CloudFront ensured that there were no issues with performance or latency. With this improvement in their technical stack, MyRunway no longer experiences downtime and has high availability and performance even during peak seasonal sales periods and events like Secret Sale and Black Friday.
Anel commented, “I am exceptionally happy with the outcome, we have not experienced any further downtime since the deployment. The solution offered by Silicon Overdrive was exactly what was required, and costs were within budget.”
CareConnect
Health Information Exchange
About the Customer
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 Customer
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 Customer
Computer Mania is the largest independent technology retailer with an online store and retail stores in major Western Cape and Gauteng shopping centers. 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, optimize its resource utilization, 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 Customer
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 Customer
Adumo Online is South Africa’s largest independent online payments processor trusted by retailers. Whether a large multi-national, independent retailer, entrepreneur or informal trader, Adumo Online has the technology and expertise to grow and expand businesses in an ever-changing environment.
Adumo Online offers a full platform of secure, cashless, online payment solutions, including the service and support to help businesses grow across all eCommerce channels. The company proudly operates as part of the Adumo Group in South Africa and some SADC countries in Sub-Saharan Africa.
The Challenge
After acquiring the South African operation of the Wirecard Solutions, Adumo Online was created. Adumo Online needed to migrate its environment from on-premise and a local ISP to AWS cloud.
Adumo Online reached out to Silicon Overdrive, an AWS Advanced Partner, to assist with finding the right solution.
The Solution
Silicon Overdrive investigated and performed assessments on Adumo Online’s IT environment. Silicon Overdrive recommended architecting a secure, PCI DSS Level 1 and ISO 27001 compliant and scalable solution and assisted with Adumo Online’s migration of their Windows and Linux workloads to AWS cloud, thereby making it the perfect host for Adumo Online.
By deploying the environment across multiple availability zones, it enabled a highly scalable solution to ensure continuity of services for their customers. Silicon Overdrive also assisted Adumo Online access AWS Funding for their migration.
The Outcome
Adumo Online has the best-practice, scalable, secure, and PCI DSS Level 1 compliant cloud environment on AWS. Adumo Online’s IT environment is secure for future growth and is ensured that its customers will enjoy a seamless experience.
Adumo Online achieved Level 1 PCI DSS compliance, successfully meeting their business requirements.
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 Customer
Lupiya’s goal is to expand access to credit and lower the cost of borrowing for millions of Zambians.
They aim to level the playing field for all Zambians by offering low cost lending products and attainable options for security. They try to distance themselves from traditional lenders by being accessible to marginalized and unbanked communities and offering lending practices that are transparent and fair. More than profit, they are driven by creating a landscape that promotes an economically empowered Zambia. Their contribution is the application of fintech to bridge the financial gap.
The Challenge
Lupiya was initially hosted at IBM Cloud, but as the company grew they wanted to leverage a cloud platform that could scale with them and meet their security goals. After meeting with the AWS Startup team and the Silicon Overdrive team, Lupiya decided to migrate their environment to AWS.
When Lupiya was hosting their environment at IBM, they had deployed their workload on a single Ubuntu Kubernetes cluster.
The Solution
To ensure that the new environment could scale for future growth, Silicon Overdrive redeployed it in an Amazon ECS AWS Fargate serverless environment which would allow for high availability and auto-scaling.
AWS Fargate is a serverless compute engine for containers that works with both Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). AWS Fargate makes it easy for customers to focus on building applications. AWS Fargate removes the need to provision and manage servers, lets customers specify and pay for resources per application, and improves security through application isolation by design.
Being in the finance industry, security was a top priority and as such the Silicon Overdrive team ensured that the new environment would comply with AWS Security best practices to better safeguard customer data.
The Outcome
Since moving to AWS, Lupiya has ensured that their apps are running in a secure, scalable and highly-available best practice environment, and they have also been able to reduce their monthly spend thanks to the utilization of the serverless deployment.
Blue Pearl
About the Customer
Blue Pearl‘s core service offerings range from Business Intelligence to Big Data and Data Analytics. The company strives for perfection and aims to be the best Business Intelligence company in South Africa and Globally. Through their powerful Data Visualisation Tools, they ensure a customer gets clear insights into their data and can therefore make the best decisions.
The app ( www.blueapp.blue) matches consultants and organizations and brings them together for projects. “We really think we are setting trends in this space,” said Saireshan Govender, the CEO of Blue Pearl. “We call ourselves the Air BnB of contracting, but we offer far more than that. We enable people who never thought they could be entrepreneurs to be entrepreneurs.”
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.
One of the biggest challenges Blue Pearl was hoping to overcome was scalability, and so they decided that the best solution would be a serverless environment. However, the internal development team had limited experience with developing a serverless environment and asked Silicon Overdrive to assist with architecting a scalable, cost-effective, secure serverless environment.
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 centers 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 recognized organizations.
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 recognized 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 optimized, 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 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 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
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.
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
By utilizing DevOps methodologies, Change Technologies was able to achieve PCI compliance faster than what would otherwise have been possible; allowing them to achieve a faster time to market. PCI DSS Level 1 compliance was achieved within five months after engaging with our AWS DevOps team.
Lessons Learned
Utilizing natively PCI compliant AWS services greatly reduced project timelines and risk. This also enabled the team to change the architecture and technology stack to leverage DevOps practices and serverless services with security best practice standards required to achieve and maintain PCI compliance.
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
DevOps helps customers achieve speed and agility. Furthermore automating migrations and deployments provides customers with consistent and increased assurance. Configuration can be standardized and drift detected. By bringing security into the DevOps process from the beginning, customers can save money and more consistently meet deadlines.
Electrum
The Challenge
Electrum Payments provides enterprise software that represents the next generation of payments technology. Major retailers and 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 personalized learning environment.
DaySeven Training elected to run their Moodle environment on AWS, and the initial deployment met all their organizational 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 Customer
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 center 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 centers 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]”