Business Challenge 

A leading transportation customer made a bold decision to build out an  Enterprise Cloud Enablement (ECE) platform, founded upon Amazon Web  Services to allow its internal technology consumers and business colleagues to  quickly provision high quality and secure infrastructure in AWS. They partnered  with Versent in order to lay the foundation for a successful digital roadmap to  build from.

“The challenge for Versent was to provide an ASX Top 10 company … with a  strong security foundation without necessarily slowing down the speed of  product delivery with complexity from security. Versent has developed our  security principles based on our experience with successfully and securely  deployed applications into AWS. These principles leverage AWS services to  implement security controls and guard rails for AWS customers. The  foundations of [the] ECE platform are built on Versent’s security principles. A  testament to our strong principles is the successful PCI Compliance Audit that  the platform has undergone recently.” General Manager – Infrastructure &  Service Delivery. 

Consolidation was also required to leverage the data collected across the  various pre-existing websites and transactions. The business also needed to  simultaneously provide on-demand internal services with quicker value back to  the business. To meet the various challenges, an enterprise-scale cloud  infrastructure solution was proposed, with delivery to follow Amazon Web  Services’ (AWS) best-practice methodology. From the very beginning, the  customer was looking to benefit from the consistency & confidence DevOps  principles brings thanks to strong automation & repeatability, as well as  embrace the “always on” nature of AWS’ public cloud. 

The range of service requirements included Change Management, Compliance,  Event Monitoring, patching, incident response and BCP / DR. 

Approach 

To assist with these challenges, Versent was selected as the implementation  partner to lay technology foundations that could enable rapid change, which  took shape in the form of a centralised, built-for-purpose Enterprise Cloud  Enablement (ECE) solution, housed within a fully automated, native AWS cloud  environment.

The ECE solution relied on two key elements to make it successful: core Amazon  IaaS offerings (EC2, EBS, S3 etc.), as well as managing more complex  infrastructure as software to enable management of both at the same time, i.e. full stack automation. With a focus on discipline and automation, the solution  was developed in a ‘build factory’ using a variety of fit-for-purpose, open source  and major provider tools, all set up as non-proprietary ecosystems. 

The Versent security principles applied included enabling CloudTrail logs in all  Regions and logging all application logs in CloudWatch. Monitoring and logging  was integrated with Sumologic, managed by Versent Managed services team.  This provided advanced metrics on the multiple AWS Accounts they managed for  the organisation. These metrics are currently used to investigate and apply  mitigations to any malicious activity on the AWS environments. 

“During the project, our AWS security posture was kept aligned to our enterprise  security model. This helped us achieve our “Secure Cloud Adoption” goal while  maintaining speed of delivery.” GM – Infrastructure & Service Delivery. 

An internal customer team was built as part of establishing the platform, and  additional benefits such as improving the speed in which the critical business  functions were able to work became present. 

Benefits 

“Versent delivered the solution in just four months and the benefits to our  business were almost instant. We’ve seen an increase in collaboration, zero  downtime, and improved speed to market. This has allowed us to make quicker  decisions and implement changes with much faster outcomes also provided  immediate value-add. It has also allowed our internal teams to continue  managing the platform and the stream of projects which now stem from it.” GM – Infrastructure & Service Delivery. 

The ECE project formed part of a larger program and was a significant and  meaningful step for the customer strategy. It also enabled build patterns  developed during the ECE project that are repeatable and of the highest  quality. This repeatability drives cost efficiency for new technology and digital  initiatives. 

The solution laid the foundations for a new means of customer engagement,  and the delivery of new consumer-facing content and products with a higher  degree of quality – due to the streamlining of multiple internal functions. 

“Additionally, we were able to provide value back to the business by making  critical applications always available, but more importantly, a quicker  turnaround time frame … to win more business”. GM – Infrastructure & Service Delivery.