About the Client
GLU Global (‘GLU’ – www.gluglobal.com) is a team of highly experienced business and system integration specialists who love solving challenges and making an impact. They help their clients to cut the cost of delivering impactful solutions using their No Code, industry agnostic, enterprise integration platform – GLU.Ware. The GLU.Ware platform is the culmination of GLU’s collective 100+ years of Integration experience gained in emerging market environments. Integration is the catalyst of innovation with GLU.Ware enabling ‘Innovation at Speed’. It empowers Enterprises with an ability to innovate and to be more digitally agile than their competition.
Objective
GLU contacted Silicon Overdrive (Silicon Overdrive – https://www.overdrive.co.za/aws-migrations) an Amazon Web Services Advanced Partner to conduct an AWS Well-Architected Framework Review of GLU’s AWS setup. The Framework provides architectural best practices for designing and operating secure, reliable, efficient, cost-effective, and sustainable workloads in the AWS Cloud. It provides a way for organizations to consistently measure their architecture against best practices and to identify areas for improvement. The GLU team required the Well-Architected Framework Review (WAFR) to evaluate and improve their AWS cloud infrastructure to ensure its alignment to industry best practices. This AWS WARF process represents an important step in GLU’s due diligence discipline which aims to ensure continuous improvement in GLU’s governance, security, compliance, scalability and operations posture.
Solution
Silicon Overdrive conducted the WAFR to evaluate GLU’s AWS environment against the six WAFR pillars of operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimization and sustainability. Silicon Overdrive and the GLU team implemented improvements to address the key items discovered during the Review. An improved Disaster Recovery, Backup and Restore Policy was defined based on GLU recovery objectives and improvements implemented to their backup and restore processes. Amazon CloudWatch was implemented to improve the reliability and efficiency of GLU’s AWS environments. Amazon CloudWatch monitors GLU’s AWS resources and the applications they run in real time. CloudWatch collects and tracks metrics to measure and improve resource utilization visualized through custom dashboards. Additional AWS Security and Compliance Services such as AWS Config were implemented to improve security posture and to meet compliance requirements. AWS Config enables GLU to assess, audit, and evaluate configurations of their resources. GLU also implemented numerous enhancements to optimize and improve system performance, scalability and reliability.
Outcome
Silicon Overdrive recommendations were based on the results from the Well-Architected Framework Review, and the remediations assisted GLU to improve their AWS Cloud setup by ensuring its alignment to AWS best practices and design principles for overall reliability, security and compliance. Silicon Overdrive’s technical due diligence process when conducting a Well Architected Framework Review, includes running conformity assessments which enables GLU to view their compliance status and act on threats with immediacy. Through this process, GLU achieved high ISO 27001, PCI-DSS and GDPR compliance scores within a short period of time. The use of AWS CloudWatch enables GLU to optimize the way their clients interact with the GLU.Ware platform. AWS Config provides GLU with optimised change management controls as decisions can be based on real-time information. GLU now has advanced monitoring and logging systems that provide a single view of their environments. Operational efficiency has been improved as the Advanced Audit dashboard provides GLU with a single view of how their infrastructure is performing empowering an ability for real-time actions to be taken. Improvements that have increased system performance efficiency have also led to operational cost optimization through Compute right sizing.
Richard Price, Senior DevOps Manager at GLU Global said: “It was a pleasure to partner with Silicon Overdrive; they have been professional and knowledgeable about AWS architecture. The Well Architected Framework Review has enabled us to improve efficiencies and be more in control of our environment at all times. GLU now has an even more robust offering to gain entry to new markets as well as improving our existing client capabilities thanks to our enhanced and modernized AWS infrastructure.”
“Strong leadership is the true cornerstone of any organization. This is a true reflection experienced working with Richard and his team at GLU Global. The six pillars of the WAFR and implementation thereof was successful due to the buy in of Richard and all the teams involved,” said Charlton Daniels, AWS Migrations Director at Silicon Overdrive.