The urgent need to modernise
Studentnet needed to find a way to remove the burden of infrastructure-related time allocation so their IT experts could focus on improving their products.
While Studentnet’s IT team was pushed to stay on top of the day-to-day maintenance of their outdated infrastructure, there were also convergent pressures from their customer’s perspective – namely, reliability of access. Their existing infrastructure isolated logs to specific containers, meaning the previous logs were lost as soon as updates were made. In addition, a lack of redundancy meant that if something went down, customers couldn’t access their database, and the IT team had no record of past issues.
To grow their company and continue delivering exceptional security, Studentnet required a solution that would:
- Ensure security updates take place quickly and easily.
- Allow them to stay on top of vulnerabilities rapidly.
- Provide them with redundant customer databases.
- Enable them to deal with connection issues in minutes.
- Alleviate the infrastructure burden on their team.
- Refocus their IT team on high-value business needs.
With the assistance of PolarSeven’s experienced consulting team, Studentnet began categorising their current infrastructure parameters and building a roadmap for modernisation. The PolarSeven team saw opportunities for optimisation that went beyond the original pain points Studentnet were experiencing. They worked together to build a plan that solved their immediate issues and placed the company on the leading edge of cloud technology and future growth.
A comprehensive infrastructure transformation
Along with migrating and standardising existing component build pipelines to AWS Code Pipelines, the PolarSeven team re-platformed 900+ Docker Swarm containers to Amazon Elastic Container Services (ECS), resolving existing network issues and retiring redundant monitoring components to AWS ECS.
The project’s key implementation areas were:
- Compute efficiency: The solution boosted client service quality and improved compute resource utilisation by implementing autoscaling services. These replaced the previously static, fixed-cost, rack-mounted servers.
- Protection: CloudFront and AWS WAF provided layer 3, 4, & 7 DDoS & application protection.
- Deployment procedures: Developed multi-tenant release and deployment procedures for automated deployment of new instances of the authentication service, reducing the security footprint and enabling complete environment deployment in an AWS account within 45 minutes using CloudFormation IAC.
- Single sign-on security: Deployment of Landing Zone through Control Tower, configuration of Single Sign-On (SSO) for cloud administration, and separation of production and non-production workloads.
Results that exceeded expectations
The solution that PolarSeven implemented is bringing unexpected positive outcomes to Studentnet, including:
- AWS Control Tower: Providing full control over who has access to which areas of their infrastructure.
- Amazon CloudWatch: Allows them to see all of the specific deployments for each school and retain all logs for troubleshooting.
- Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR): Built-in security findings enable data-driven decisions by management.
- Access to new features and capabilities: Such as Secret Storage and System Manager, improving centralisation and security.
- Improved reliability: With AWS ECS, they can now rapidly scale resources and respond to connection issues in minutes.
Moving forward with confidence
At the start of the project, Studentnet wasn’t sure of the exact solutions they required. The team from PolarSeven was able to understand their unique environment, advise them on the best approach, and then plan and implement a modernisation plan that will carry them confidently into the future.
The increased capabilities from the AWS cloud network will allow Studentnet to proactively avoid future pain points and continue supporting their customers to the highest standards.
