The Client

Founded in 1989 and specialising in Business Psychology, Team Focus Limited (TFL) combined applying Psychology to Business in its assessment and development work with becoming one of the leading trainers in Psychometric Testing.

The Problem

TFL were unhappy with the current support and performance of the cloud platform hosting their flagship psychometric testing application, Profiling for Success, and wanted to move to a vendor that could improve these issues as well as provide a platform that could maintain any future growth, whilst allowing them to maintain a level of cyber security that would meet or exceed the UK Cyber Essentials Plus scheme.   They approached Hydras to help them with this.

The Solution

Hydras discussed possible solutions with TFL and proposed the "Secure Platform Accelerator" which would give them a secure, multi-account landing zone that would help them meet their Cyber Essentials Plus requirements due to the base level of security that is applied.   In addition, the landing zone would allow them to provision multiple AWS accounts to hold the various versions of Profiling for Success application (test, staging and production) providing a clear security boundary between each environment.  In addition to this Hydras recommended its Core AWS Managed Service offering which included AWS Managed Security plus the Managed Platform add-on.  This set of managed services would provide ongoing AWS multi-account and security management post go-live.  

TFL accepted this proposal and Hydras began by building them an AWS multi-account platform based on AWS Control Tower, with additional security controls enabled and managed by a designated security account.  In addition Hydras provisioned three "workload" AWS accounts for the Profiling for Success application, one for production, one for staging and one for test.   Hydras then created AWS infrastructure to run the application, using CloudFormation templates, in each of the accounts  as well as a deployment pipeline using AWS CodePipeline.   The application was deployed and extensively tested in the test and staging AWS accounts before Hydras performed a full migration of the application from its current production environment into the new AWS production account.

Once complete, Hydras handed the environment over to its operational team to perform continued AWS managed services.

The Outcome

By using Hydras and it's range of service offerings, TFL were able to overcome the issues they had with their current vendor whilst also improving the security and governance of their environment in order to help them with their compliance requirements.  In addition by utilising Hydras managed services they reduced the heavily lifting required to manage their system allowing them to focus on improving the application feature set and increasing their customer base.