Cloud Based Network and Infrastructure Solution for Leading SaaS Customer Journey Management Platform

A leading SaaS Customer Journey Management Platform that provides B2C businesses with an Omni-Channel Customer Data Platform that helps them deliver Highly-Personalized, Timely, Relevant and Memorable Customer. The platform is AI powered customer data experience platform, enabling B2C businesses to deliver highly personalized customer experience

Citrus Consulting Services Enables A Leading SaaS Customer Journey Management Platform to Implement a Global and Scalable Cloud Based Network and Infrastructure Solution using Amazon Web Services.

The customer encountered the following challenges which inclined them to evaluate and leverage public cloud platforms:

• The customer needed a decentralized and a decoupled system to make their IT infrastructure highly available, secure, reliable, scalable and cost effective.
• The customer was interested in an OPEX (Operational Expenditure) model in terms of expenditure. This would help them by not blocking their precious budget on capital intensive projects.
• The customer also had a requirement of a flexible platform which could incorporate and be integrated with various operating systems, programming languages, web application platforms, databases and other services needed for hosting a custom banking application in minimal time.
• The customer also had a critical requirement of hosting applications in multiple availability zones in order to ensure load balancing, business continuity and high availability.
• The customer also had a requirement of a Web Application Firewall in order to protect their applications facing the web along with thorough traffic analysis and visibility.
• The customer had a requirement of a reliable disaster recovery setup. They needed to have this disaster recovery setup to be activated only at the time of critical circumstances (again to minimize capital expenditure).

The customer’s infrastructure is running on AWS Cloud leveraging multiple services of AWS like Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud to house various VMs designated for different operations and applications of the customer and provide secure and resizable compute capacity in the cloud.

Each EC2 instance is attached with Amazon Elastic Block Store Volume which is a high-performance block storage service designed for use with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) for both throughput and transaction intensive workloads at high scale. This duo of EC2 instances and EBS Volumes resides safely on Amazon Virtual Private Cloud.

The customer also uses various other services like AWS CloudTrail which is a service that enables governance, compliance, operational auditing, and risk auditing along with a service for monitoring and observing named Amazon CloudWatch. Amazon Aurora was used as a MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database built for the cloud, that combines the performance and availability of traditional enterprise databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases.

Amazon ElasticSearch is used as a managed service in the AWS Cloud that makes it simple and cost-effective to set up, manage, and scale a search solution for your website or application. Along with that is configured AWS Lambda, used to run the backend service code without provisioning or managing servers as an optimization strategy for managing costs and paying for only the consumed compute time.

For managing the AWS Account, AWS IAM service was used. AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) is a web service for securely controlling access to AWS services. With IAM, one can centrally manage users, security credentials such as access keys, and permissions thereby control which AWS resources users and applications can access.

For safeguarding web applications, AWS WAF Service was used. AWS WAF is a web application firewall that monitors HTTP and HTTPS requests that are forwarded to an AWS API Gateway API, AWS CloudFront or an Application Load Balancer. AWS WAF also controls access to content. Based on conditions specified, such as specific IP addresses requests that originate from or the values of query strings, it responds either with the requested content or with an HTTP 403 status code (Forbidden).

For Monitoring the provisioned resources and Auditing users Amazon CloudWatch & AWS CloudTrail services were used. Amazon CloudWatch monitors AWS Web Services (AWS) resources and the applications that run on AWS in real time. One can use CloudWatch to collect and track metrics, which are variables that can be measured for resources and applications. AWS CloudTrail is a service that enables governance, compliance, operational auditing, and risk auditing of AWS account[s]. With CloudTrail, one can log, continuously monitor, and retain account activity related to actions across their AWS infrastructure.

The migration and security implementation project for the customer nearly took 2 months of effort initiated later in 2020. It was in turn subdivided into various milestones for setting up the base environment, testing environment followed by the setup of the AWS native security tools.

• On time delivery of project so that critical application can go live addressing business requirements.
• Successful test results for Alpha, Beta and User Acceptance Testing of the entire infrastructure on AWS in order to validate the functionality of the entire system.
• Successful implementation and testing of failover and failback in the Disaster Recovery scenario.
• Ensure 100% business continuity of the applications and operations for the customer .
• Successful test results for stress testing performed for the application and infrastructure.

• Achieved about 20% drop in the total cost of operations and infrastructure.
• Achieved 100% successful alpha, beta, user-acceptance and stress test scenarios and subsequent cases.
• Achieved 0% penetration points for online application and infrastructure via repeated VAPT.
• Ensured 100% business continuity for the customer through 24/7 Managed Support Services by Citrus Consulting Services.