AWS Security and Managed Services

Vistra is a leading provider of funds and corporate services. Over recent years, they have expanded rapidly through acquisitions, organic growth and mergers and now employ over 5000 professionals across the globe.

Building a Scalable Infrastructure for a Global Rebrand

As part of a global rebranding project, due to a recent merger, Vistra approached Hydras, part of the Acora Group, to help them migrate their corporate website from their current environment to a new, higher-performing and scalable infrastructure. The current environment had little resilience, no scaling ability and the current performance was not fit for purpose based on the forecasted demands of the new site.

The requirements were to build an infrastructure that could handle the forecasted demands, have built-in resiliency and meet the company’s cyber security needs. Hydras were to build a secure pipeline for deploying the application code that the development team could use.

Embedding Cloud Security Expertise into AWS Transformation

Hydras’ security consultants worked closely with Vistra management and their development team to identify potential architectural solutions within AWS before agreeing on a final design. The final solution was based on AWS EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) as this provided the required resiliency, scalability and security whilst also providing a platform that the developers could deploy to easily by using containers created on their development machines. Hydras built the infrastructure using full automation, via CloudFormation templates, so that it could be easily updated and reproduced. Test, staging and production environments were built using this method, which aligned with the Vistra development team’s requirements.

Next, Kube bench and AWS Security Hub were configured, which would report on security issues within the EKS setup and send alerts to the operations team. Finally, Hydras built a deployment pipeline based on AWS CodePipeline and CodeBuild that would deploy application code to the working environments.

Once completed, Vistra used Hydras AWS Managed Services to provide support for the underlying AWS account and EKS Infrastructure as well as support several other legacy Vistra websites that were being maintained.

Delivering a Scalable, High-Performance Cloud Platform

Hydras were able to provide Vistra with a fully supported high-performing, secure, scaleable and cost-effective infrastructure for their website. This reduced the need for Vistra to have their own dedicated support team whilst providing them with the security and performance levels that they required. In addition, the development team are now able to deploy code updates to the site via full automation, decreasing deployment cycles and increasing the number of changes that can be made to the application.