NCS
Analytics
NCS improves Security and DevOps Pipeline with help from Qwinix using AWS Well-Architected Framework (WAF).
NCS is a data analytics and software company specializing in the detection of illicit activity in high-risk areas for government agencies and financial institutions. Through their proprietary algorithms, NCS monitors cannabis, opioids, alcohol, tobacco, pay-day lending, etc. The company’s software identifies outliers while helping agencies appropriately audit their constituents.
NCS needed a public cloud platform to host its data analytics applications and to manage its data transformation staging and pipeline testing. This included the need for a DevOps work process pipeline for development, testing, and production code for application development and production delivery of SAAS.
Qwinix combined its application development team with its AWS Cloud professional services to deploy the best practices of the AWS Well-Architected Framework (WAF) for NCS solution success.
the Challenge
- Compliance: Existing infrastructure design did not meet various industry standards.
- Performance: Angular website hosting was performing poorly. Backing services commonly running at high average system load causing frequent “glitches” and outages throughout the system.
- Security: Application service security perimeter was exposed to exploit the potential.
the Solution
- Following industry best practices, Qwinix developed infrastructure as code via AWS CloudFormation templates. AWS CloudFormation templates added consistency to the team’s ability to deliver infrastructure updates through the various environments.
- Qwinix developed a plan to implement a CloudFront-based solution backed by S3 to relieve the application tier from serving static assets. Static content is now served from edge locations closer to users. This resulted in faster load time and content distribution.
- Qwinix worked with NCS on an architecture review. Using AWS Well-Architected Framework (WAF) to build a more secure infrastructure, we implemented patterns of least privileged access and subnet isolation to provide NCS service with a more secure operational environment.
the Benefits
- Additional Security Cover: Qwinix worked with the NCS team to develop tighter security requirements using AWS Well-Architected Framework (WAF). By increasing security using Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), services are better insulated from security threats.
- Application Monitoring: Utilizing AWS CloudWatch and third party services for in-depth application tracing, Qwinix helped the team at NCS to see how their applications are performing in near real-time. This data has been fed back into the system to reduce bottlenecks and increase overall application performance.