SafeGuard Cyber

AWS – securing the security sector

As the name suggests, SafeGuard Cyber (SGC) is a cybersecurity company that safeguards organisations against cyber threats.

Realising businesses and governments were leaving the traditional security perimeter to adopt transformational digital and social media communication channels, SGC developed an intelligent Cloud-based, API first solution to systematically identify and act against risks, at scale.

Being SGC’s trusted partner for professional services since 2015, and areas of development, QA and DevOps since 2020, GlobalLogic was an obvious choice to help migrate core applications to AWS – a Cloud platform capable of keeping up with the growth of the business and growing sophistication of cyber threats.

The challenge

Before the migration to AWS, SGC was running its module of core applications on-premise. The servers were subject to Windows licensing under the supervision of Hetzner. Because of the set-up, SGC was experiencing inflated costs and high latency between its on-prem and Cloud-based platforms.

Since AWS was SGC’s primary Cloud provider, it was agreed to migrate all production workloads from Hetzner to AWS, using a refactor approach. Under the supervision of SGC’s VP of Architecture and Infrastructure, GlobalLogic designed and executed a plan to carry out the migration in phases.

The solution

To determine the best fit Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and other AWS database requirements, GlobalLogic began by analysing the on-premise data center and resource utilisation using monitoring tools and manual calculation. Bash scripts were used to sync data from on-premise to AWS, based on clients ID or Channel ID of Client. A proprietary migration tool was also developed by GlobalLogic to utilise migrated data from on-premise to AWS and complete sanity checks.

A refactor approach was used to migrate the windows-based functionality to containers, running on top of Docker Swarm. This process saw the team break down the module of applications and rebuild them in a service-oriented, scalable design. Not only did it enable a complete migration to the Cloud, it empowered SGC to reduce cost of ownership and introduce Cloud-native microservices to isolate faults across the applications. The microservices model also improved visibility and monitoring of security risks, enabled the use of CI/CD pipelines and simplified functionality updates to meet end-user needs.

Other tools used throughout the project included AWS Cloud, Terraform, Ansible, Docker Swarm, Bamboo, RabbitMQ, Elastic Search, Cassandra, DataDog, Crowdstrike.

What value did GlobalLogic bring?

Whilst cyber-attacks cause major concerns cross industry, nobody worries about cybersecurity more than a cybersecurity CEO. This is because it’s not just financial loss that keeps them up at night, it’s damage to the company’s reputation, and loss of customer trust too.

Whilst SGC understood the benefits of unifying their infrastructure, they wanted to leave nothing to chance. Engaging the services of a seasoned AWS Migration Competency Partner such as GlobalLogic, enabled SGC to avoid unnecessary trial and error and instead, immediately tap into a wealth of platform engineering knowledge and Cloud- native expertise.

Not only were AWS best practices followed to ensure maximum value was extracted from the platform, SGC was safe in the knowledge that the right tools were integrated to align ongoing business and IT strategy.

In just 2.5 months, GlobalLogic delivered the following for SGC:

On-premise data centre application migrated to AWS Application performance increase with reduction in latency
Increased application performance through reductions in latency. Using an AWS RDS multi-AZ implementation saw application response times improve by 20%
High availability achieved using AWS features, such as multi-Availability Zones (multi-AZ) for Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) and multi-AZ for subnets and nodes distribution
Disaster recovery designed using features like AWS backup and datasync for greater reliability and efficiency
Enhanced security both internally and externally by following IAM and security groups in place with limited access
Implemented a number of security tools to secure the AWS infrastructure (GuardDuty, Config, TrustedAdvisor)