Welcome to Silicon Overdrive!
Launched in 2019, the Valenture Institute is a pioneering online high school with a global curriculum recognized by elite universities like Yale, Harvard, and Oxford. Its mission is to make high-quality education accessible and affordable, especially in South Africa. The institute provides a mix of paid and free programs, scholarships, and blended learning micro-schools. It focuses on inclusivity and leveraging technology to transcend traditional educational barriers.
Valenture Institute was running existing AWS workloads and required assistance in addressing security concerns. The organization aimed to enhance these workloads by aligning them more closely with best practices.
Valenture Institute had previously conducted a Well-Architected Framework Review (WAFR) of their five core workloads with a third party. They approached Silicon Overdrive to conduct a new WAFR and subsequently implement remediations on identified high-risk items. These remediations included migrating their databases and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to new best practice AWS accounts. These workloads included Adult Matric, Cambridge International, CAPS Curriculum, Open Educational Resources, Internal Integrations Layer coupled with their Learner and Guardian Portal and their data analytics workloads.
The goal was to follow best practice and split these workloads over multiple accounts for better management and security.
Silicon Overdrive provided essential technical assistance by helping to migrate all five environments to new AWS accounts.
The Silicon Overdrive team set up an AWS Landing Zone account and a CloudWatch Dashboard, effectively distributing workloads across multiple accounts. This approach allowed for more streamlined, structured, and secure resource management.
By following best practices and distributing workloads across several accounts, this enabled enhanced workload management, reduced costs, and improved security. Each department could transparently view its operating costs, which promoted more efficient budgeting and resource allocation.
In addition to the migration, strict security measures were implemented to strengthen the environment’s security posture. These measures included migrating workloads from public to private subnets, optimizing Network Access Control Lists (NACLs), and enforcing least privilege access while restricting content access.
IAM policies were enforced, reviewed compliance, documented control objectives, rotated access keys, and configured GuardDuty and AWS CloudTrail.
Silicon Overdrive also ensured high availability, fault tolerance, and improved speed by incorporating CloudFront into the environment. This comprehensive approach further enhanced security and improved the efficiency and performance of Valenture Institute’s AWS workloads.
With the new landing zone setup, each account was organized to include its own development (DEV), quality assurance (QA), and production environments, resulting in a total of 18 accounts. This significant migration effort required meticulous planning and execution to ensure a smooth transition.
Valenture Institute’s workloads were successfully split over multiple accounts, allowing them to test before pushing to production. Stringent security measures were also implemented, significantly enhancing the security posture of their AWS environment.
The overall project was successful, with Valenture Institute now operating in a more secure and efficient AWS estate.
Al-Ridhaa Khan, IT Services Manager at Valenture Institute, said, “Fantastic and knowledgeable team to be able to work with. A wonderful group of people that really go the extra mile to help where they can, resolve issues timeously and always ensure that the client learns from the process too. I would highly recommend Silicon Overdrive as your AWS Infrastructure Partner!”
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