How At-Bay built a powerful infrastructure platform on AWS to accelerate business expansion

Background
At-Bay helps businesses meet digital risks head-on. By combining world-class technology with industry-leading insurance expertise, At-Bay offers clarity and confidence to businesses in the digital age. They believe that every business, big or small, when empowered to understand and manage risk, can thrive in the digital world.
Identifying the Problem
At-Bay experienced exponential growth with an increased demand for cyber insurance policies as Covid-19 increased the awareness of ransomware around the globe
Facing many issues within its legacy cloud infrastructure, as well as problems related to scale, At-Bay decided to revolutionize its platform and migrate to AWS with the help of Directeam.
Facing the Challenge
In response to growing demands from customers and product development, At-Bay had to accelerate its delivery cycle while ensuring platform stability. Moving from a monolithic platform to microservices on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) was the right solution for the company.
Assessing the migration to AWS, while accounting for At-Bay’s large SQL database systems, an effective AWS migration program required accurate planning and a good understanding of the database structure and usage in order to migrate the data seamlessly.
Finding
the Best Solution
Making sure the cloud infrastructure is robust and secure is key for any organization, especially for organizations managing insurance policies for customers around the globe. We helped At-Bay with designing a multi-account strategy in AWS, in order to meet high-level security principles with tools such as Control Tower, AWS SSO, Organizational SCPs, and many more acting as the baseline for the entire infrastructure.
AWS offered a more robust, resilient, and cost-efficient set of infrastructure solutions, and Directeam was able to help design, plan, migrate and support throughout the entire process.
What we did
Directeam helped At-Bay adopt Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), enabling the R&D teams to accomplish implementations of solutions faster. At-Bay lacked prior experience in deploying Kubernetes production environments, and Directeam took the lead and provided guidance on adopting EKS effectively.
Moving to microservices was a joint effort, understanding the requirements and security principles of each group of services. This was followed by building the right set of tooling to simplify the deployment, and maintenance and maximize the ease of usage for the R&D and operational teams.
As part of the cloud management efforts, the complexity of migrating a large SQL server, its schema, and data structure were reviewed. A large amount of binary data that was stored in the database was targeted to move to an object store based on S3. By reducing the total size of the SQL database we managed to simplify the entire database migration process and re-model the data store placement.
To keep At-Bay’s team up to date with their knowledge of the AWS Well-Architected Framework and Kubernetes best practices, Directeam as an Immersion Days certified partner delivered a set of training sessions to boost the expertise of the various teams operating in At-Bay.
The Result
- Large and complex SQL database workloads were migrated to highly scalable AWS cloud environments for At-Bay.
- AWS cloud environment was designed to maximize service availability with a robust and resilient architecture.
- Stringent regulatory compliance was achieved by implementing strong access and information security controls
- Extensive training programs were delivered to supercharge the AWS knowledge and expertise of At-Bay R&D teams.