South African investment company accelerates its cloud journey

EasyEquities, an innovative South Africa investment platform, began its journey into the Amazon Web Services in 2019. The company sought to implement a robust cloud infrastructure based on best practices and needed a partner to accelerate the journey. EasyEquities consulted Synthesis due to its vast experience of working with AWS and its track record of delivering solutions for blue-chip financial service providers.

Challenge

EasyEquities needed to implement an AWS Landing Zone to manage its cloud estate but did not know how to do this alone. This can consume a significant amount of time to implement due to complex architectural, security and cost configuration choices, all of which require thorough knowledge of AWS when handling multiple accounts.

Solution

Synthesis accelerated the EasyEquities journey to cloud by leveraging the AWS Landing Zone implementation to deploy and began to operationalise a business workload, as well as enable the EasyEquities’ application teams to become cloud-ready through co-creation.

Synthesis follow a set of recommended AWS design patterns combined with the industry’s best-practices and enriched through practical implementations in the financial services sector.

Darryl Govender, Head of Cloud Services at Synthesis, said: “Our approach included enabling the EasyEquities team to learn how to manage their Landing Zone while accelerating their cloud skills. Our customer now has a solid understanding of their cloud infrastructure. Knowledge transfer is a very important element to customer success.”

Synthesis also migrated the EasyEquities applications to their new AWS account once the Landing Zone was configured.

Results

Synthesis and EasyEquities implemented an optimised platform with defined policy rules (guardrails) that enable teams to easily create new accounts and workloads without spending hours configuring features or settings. Guardrails eliminate repetitive tasks and provide peace of mind that security and other rules are never compromised through misconfiguration.

EasyEquities now have a platform that provides governance across their cloud infrastructure and is geared for future growth as they migrate more applications or develop innovative new products on AWS.

Synthesis also provided a well-architected review for EasyEquities, an AWS Program that grants US$5,000 in AWS credits for any workload that is improved in accordance with the AWS Well-Architected Framework.