case study about cloud computing

Airline evolves customer experience with IBM public cloud platform and services.

UBank shrinks time to market — builds a loan app virtual assistant on IBM Cloud platform.

Eurobits helps banks give trusted third-parties access to account information.

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The American Association of Insurance Services partnered with IBM to create an open blockchain network that streamlines regulatory reporting. The network provides new insights for insurers, while also enhancing timeliness, accuracy and value for regulators.

With IBM Cloud bare metal server infrastructure hosted worldwide and the Veeam on IBM Cloud backup and restore service, Movius provides its multiline offering to enterprises around the globe.

Together, IBM and Vodafone Business will help companies remove the complexity and barriers from their technology choices and ensure data and applications flow freely and securely across their organizations. Under the new venture, Vodafone Business customers will immediately have access to the full portfolio of IBM Cloud offerings, underpinned by IBM's deep industry expertise and open technologies.

To transform its service desk operations, banking group Creval deployed a virtual assistant, powered by IBM Watson technology, that reduced service desk calls by 80 percent and allowed staff to focus on high-value tasks that drive customer service excellence.

To help ensure clients can access the latest pricing and execute trades rapidly and accurately, online broker ActivTrades migrated its primary trading platforms from on-premises infrastructure to IBM Cloud for VMware solutions.

Allianz wanted a mobile assistant solution that worked across platforms to better serve customers. Using IBM Cloud and IBM Watson Assistant, the company created an AI-powered virtual assistant that can field 80 percent of its most frequent customer requests — for real help in real time.

IBM is helping American Airlines migrate some of its critical applications to the IBM Cloud while using new methodology to create innovative applications quickly and improve the customer experience.

To help its clients focus on strategic activities rather than low-value tasks, Contextor teamed up with IBM to augment its robotic process automation solutions with artificial intelligence capabilities.

To help state healthcare agencies address new regulations, Deloitte teamed with IBM to develop the Medicaid Enterprise Solution (MES) HealthInteractive Platform, running on IBM Cloud technology. With MES, state Medicaid programs can keep IT up to date with less effort and expense, while also aligning with federal guidance.

A Japanese airline has become the first among its competitors to develop a web-based chatbot proof of concept, generating real dialogs with 90 percent of users and confirming the company’s vision for broader cognitive applications with IBM Watson Assistant (formerly IBM Watson Conversation) and Watson Natural Language Classifier services.

Active International used the IBM Cloud to develop applications that optimize its media buying cycle and help it identify new business prospects more effectively.

Anthem partnered with IBM to drive its digital transformation and deliver an enhanced digital experience for its nearly 40 million consumers.

Assima helps employees work smarter by arming them with an intelligent application overlay hosted in the IBM Cloud and delivering AI capabilities with IBM Watson technology.

To help small and midsized businesses with liquidity management and planning, Asteria created a smart cashflow service running on scalable IBM Cloud infrastructure. With its IBM Cloud solution, the company can work in a flexible, open-source development framework while also addressing customer needs for security-rich data hosting.

Buzz Radar created a platform called the Cognitive Command Center — a digital marketing monitoring, analytics and visualization platform that harnesses IBM Watson technologies and runs in the IBM Cloud.

After working with IBM to build a cloud data warehouse and analytics architecture, Constance Hotels, Resorts & Golf can now gain data-driven insights from across its nine properties.

Building on a long track record of service innovation, ExxonMobil engaged an IBM iX team to help design and launch ExxonMobilRewards+, the industry’s first smartphone app for digital payment at the pump. The solution’s IBM Cloud public hosting platform reduces operating costs for the app by 40 percent and scales effortlessly as its user base continues to grow.

LogDNA saw a clear need to address data sprawl in the modern, cloud-native development stack. Its innovative software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform built on Kubernetes caught the attention of the IBM Cloud team, which wove it into its global framework. As both an IBM Business Partner and a client, LogDNA was able to grow and strengthen its DevOps capabilities.

Ricoh migrated its Unified Communication System operations to IBM Cloud bare metal servers, taking advantage of near-limitless scalability and capacity. This allowed the company to ensure smooth sound and vision for its rapidly expanding customer base.

UBank launched new initiatives in an IBM Cloud Platform environment, including a virtual assistant that incorporates IBM Watson technology to support the bank’s online home loan application.

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From cloud migration to harnessing cloud for innovation, we create 360° value for our clients.

Minna Bank: Japan’s first digital bank

Japan’s digital native consumers don t need a brick and mortar banking experience, so Minna Bank built a different bank for them in the cloud. 

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Nationwide Building Society migrates its payments capability to Form3 and AWS to improve its customer experience and minimize downtime.

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Interstates, Riot Games, and City of Rockingham

Interstates: Escaping chassis refresh cycles

Interstates makes its infrastructure future ready and sustainable with Cisco UCS X-Series servers and Cisco Intersight.

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Riot Games revolutionizes sports, media, and entertainment with Cisco Compute and Data Center Network technologies.

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With IT talent in short supply, City of Rockingham finds new ways to expand its infrastructure and services.

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NterOne establishes a cloud-operating model with on-premises systems.

E.On scales its data center without scaling staff and operations.

Calvary Health Care

Driving efficiency and innovation in the aged care industry, Calvary Health Care is ready for more growth with Cisco HyperFlex and Cisco Intersight.

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Cisco UCS Servers managed with Cisco Intersight helped Geographic Solutions to rapidly scale up its infrastructure.

Cisco distributed IT computing solutions has enabled Riot Games to manage all of its e-sports servers around the world using a single pane of glass.

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Berkeley Haas Case Series

The Berkeley Haas Case Series is a collection of business case studies created by UC Berkeley faculty

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The Cloud Computing Industry

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Pub Date: February 1, 2021

Discipline: Innovation and technology

Subjects: Innovation (342), Internet (347), Business models (256), Computer Software (10241), Computer networks (2337), Applications (3094)

Product #: B5968-PDF-ENG

Industry: Technology

Geography: Silicon Valley, Seattle, United States

Length: 9 page(s)

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A new collection of business case studies from Berkeley Haas

The aim of the Berkeley Haas Case Series is to incite business innovation by clarifying disruptive trends and questioning the status quo.

Case Study: How Netflix uses Cloud for Innovation, Agility and Scalability

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“Planning without taking action is the slowest route to victory. Taking action without planning is the noise before defeat.” - Sun Tzu, The Art of War Introduction to cloud computing It is said that the world evolves at the speed of technological evolution. Organizations are constantly looking for new technologies...

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” - Peter Drucker, American economist and corporate philosopher Cloud computing, the advancement of computing over a network of servers, was a key driver of the tech industry in 2018. Mergers and acquisitions between large and small companies led to...

How to Streamline Your Data Archival Process using the Cloud Data archiving is the process of moving data that is no longer essential to a separate data store for long-term retention. Archived data consists of older data that might serve some importance to the organization, possibly for future reference or...

Event Date: 10-11 April 2019 Last Updated: 27 May 2019 The AWS Summit Singapore brings together the cloud computing community to connect, collaborate and learn about AWS. Cloudsine was recognized as an AWS Technology Partner and an AWS Consulting Partner last year. During the Summit, we showcased WebOrion™, an all-in-one...

Event Date: 23 May 2019 Last Updated: 27 May 2019 Startup Quarter - Secure your cloud, was a meetup organized by Division Zero (Div0) on 23rd May 2019 at ACE. Div0 an open, inclusive, and completely volunteer-driven cybersecurity community with a mission of promoting a vibrant cybersecurity community and safer...

Event Date: 4 Sept 2019 Last Updated: 10 Sept 2019 Cloudsine is glad to host our very own seminar on the theme of Cloud Security: Myths, New Security Concerns and Mitigations on 4 Sept 2019. Glad to engage and interact with an audience of Singapore and Indonesia customers, resellers and...

Event Date: 21 Nov 2019 Last Updated: 25 Nov 2019 Cloudsine had our first RPA seminar in collaboration with Automation Anywhere on the theme of the “Future of Digital Workforce with Intelligent Automation” on 21 November 2019. It was our pleasure to have Ehunt Siow and Sundarraj Subrammani from Automation...

Cloudsine Accelerates Centre for Evidence and Implementation (CEI)’s Cloud Adoption Journey by Providing Data Migration, a Customized File Portal that Integrates with AWS S3 and Cloud Data Security Assurance. The Centre for Evidence and Implementation (CEI)is a global team of research, policy and practice experts based in Australia, Singapore…

Part 1 of our own series of articles on CloudGoat and mitigation strategies. This is a step by step breakdown on how to interpret and think like an attacker and also how to go about mitigating the attacks.

Part 2 of our own series of articles on CloudGoat and mitigation strategies. This is a step by step breakdown on how to interpret and think like an attacker and also how to go about mitigating the attacks.

In this third part, we will explore privilege escalation using EC2 instance profile attachment to obtain full admin privileges on the AWS account and also exploiting SSRF on EC2’s metadata service to get credentials.

This is part 4 of the series on AWS Cloudgoat Scenarios and the mitigation strategies series where we explore and see how remote command injection on a web application can be used to compromise the AWS environment.

WebOrion® is pleased to announce the launch of our new Javascript Malware Detection Engine(JME). The JME adds to the powerful capabilities of our WebOrion® Monitor to detect defacements, malicious scripts and other website threats. Today, practically every website uses JavaScript. The power and flexibility of a scripting language embedded within...

AI Security Quarter of Div0 was officially launched on 31 Mar 2021 over virtual Zoom and attended by >50 cybersecurity and AI enthusiasts in Singapore. Cybersecurity and AI are both critically important technologies for the digital future. Attackers are using more automation and AI to help them probe and attack...

Cloudsine is excited to partner with SGInnovate at the New Frontier event on 10 Apr 2021 to help build up the deeptech community. The New Frontier event is organized by SGInnovate with Guest of Honour, Lawrence Wong (Minister for Education), to promote the growth of the deeptech ecosystem in Singapore...

Email alerts are the primary method that WebOrion Defacement Monitor uses to inform our customers about the changes to their websites. Through these email alerts, users are informed if their website becomes unreachable, or if any of WebOrion’s various engines are triggered during webpage monitoring. The email alerts are important...

Cloudsine, the parent company of WebOrion, is excited to announce the technology alliance partnership with New Net Technologies (NNT). NNT is a Cybersecurity and Compliance software company based in UK and is widely deployed in many Enterprise and Government Organizations globally. Cloudsine provides cloud consulting services and offers web defacement...

Cloudsine is honoured to partner with SUTD to sponsor the artificial intelligence award to nurture interests and identify talents in this area. Students from SUTD who are interested may enroll in 50.021 Artificial Intelligence module offered by the Information Systems Technology and Design (ISTD) pillar. In this course, students will...

"The PowerX Programme has given young Cybersecurity companies like us a boost to identify, recruit and train cyber talents that are critical for our growth." Matthias Chin, Founder and CEO of Cloudsine. The PowerX Cybersecurity and Software & Product Development programmes are SGInnovate’s 12-month programmes including structured training and industry...

There was a high severity vulnerability (CVE-2021-44228) impacting multiple versions of the Apache Log4j which was disclosed publicly on December 9, 2021. An attacker who can control log messages or log message parameters can execute arbitrary code loaded from LDAP servers when message lookup substitution is enabled. The vulnerability impacts...

Cyber Threat Activities from the Russia-Ukraine Cyberwar The Russian incursion into Ukraine has led to a conflict that involves both the physical and cyber domains, with hacking groups of differing allegiances launching cyberattacks on government, military, financial and telecommunication websites. Cybersecurity specialists worldwide have highlighted growing concerns that the intensifying...

The Resurgent Threat of Hacktivism As the Russia-Ukraine conflict intensifies, cyberwarfare continues to be waged between the two countries. Concerns remain that state-backed hacker groups may target organisations outside of Eastern Europe in retaliation for the global sanctions imposed on Russia, or as false-flag operations to further promote political narratives....

WebOrion® is glad to introduce a new feature into the existing Integrity Analytics engine – Smart Image Hash (SIH). SIH helps reduce false alerts regarding image changes by analysing them in a smarter way. Images can make websites look more attractive and have been widely adopted ever since the inclusion...

AI technologies have been widely applied to different fields, but have you ever heard of using AI technologies to monitor the defacement of webpages? WebOrion is glad to introduce a new engine to the WebOrion defacement monitoring platform – AI Natural Language Processing (NLP) Engine. This engine analyzes webpage-changes and...

Cloudsine, the parent company of WebOrion, is pleased to announce the technology alliance partnership with Netrust Pte Ltd. Netrust is an established company since 1997 and is Asia’s first Public Certification Authority (CA) andSingapore’s only commercial IMDA-accredited CA. Cloudsine provides cloud consulting services and offers web defacement detection and response...

“Serverless” is a buzzword that is thrown around especially in the cloud industry. For the inexperienced, it may seem intuitive - “server” and “less”. It does not mean having less servers, but it actually refers to lesser (or no) management of servers. Serverless services allow developers to build and run...

Discover what is the WebOrion® API and the benefits of integrating the API with various systems such as Content Management Systems like Wordpress, and in the coming days, SIEM and SOAR systems. Our simple and easy-to-follow demonstration will also show you how to seamlessly integrate the WebOrion® API with your...

For the past decade, Cloudsine has been working with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to serve the market. Cloudsine is a consulting and technology partner with AWS and has used cloud computing to build and run many secure applications to support enterprise and government customers across Asia Pacific countries including Singapore,...

Thanks to all who visited our booth at GovWare 2022, held on 18-20 October 2022, at Sands Expo and Convention Centre, Singapore. We sincerely hope that all who visited us were able to catch a glimpse of what we currently do in the cybersecurity space with WebOrion, as well as...

As a website owner, one would surely come across the Domain Name Service (DNS). DNS is an extremely critical system on the Internet, as it is a system that helps translate domain names (which are easily recognisable and remembered) into IP addresses. It is important for all website owners to...

In this video, we will be sharing with you why your DNS records are important. How an outsider can conduct DNS enumeration to determine the attack surface. What can you do to hide and secure your DNS records. What are some tools WebOrion provide that can detect changes to the...

In computer networking, ports are points of entry to your computer – virtual origins and/or destinations of network connections. Port number definition and standardisation is overseen by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). Based on the list maintained by IANA, there are three types of ports amongst the total number...

In this video, we will discuss how hackers can easily enumerate your web server and potentially find vulnerabilities that they can exploit. It is important to understand how these attacks work so that you can take steps to protect your server and your website. We will walk through the process...

Today, we are excited to announce WebOrion® Defacement Monitor and Restorer is listed as a partner of LKPP E-Katalog, https://e-katalog.lkpp.go.id/, for PEP Category, Software Security, and Antivirus License. This opens up a new channel for Indonesian public sector agencies to quickly start protecting and monitoring their websites from cyber attacks...

Hari ini, dengan gembira kami mengumumkan WebOrion® Defacement Monitor and Restorer terdaftar sebagai mitra LKPP E-Katalog, https://e-katalog.lkpp.go.id/, untuk Kategori Peralatan Elektronik dan Pendukungnya, Keamanan Perangkat Lunak, dan Lisensi Antivirus. Hal ini membuka saluran baru bagi lembaga sektor public dan Pemerintah di Indonesia untuk segera mulai melindungi dan memantau situs website...

PCI-DSS is a set of security standards designed to ensure that all companies that accept, process, store or transmit credit card information maintain a secure environment. This article is part of a series of articles under the “What’s New in PCI-DSS v4.0” series where we explore what has changed in...

What is Magecart? Magecart is a type of cybercriminal group that specializes in stealing credit card information from online stores (a.k.a card skimming). The group's attacks typically involve injecting malicious code into the checkout pages of e-commerce websites to steal payment card data from customers. The Magecart group is known...

While web defacements may not be the most prevalent cyber attack in recent years, the consequences of web defacements are real – reputations may be damaged, client-customer relationships may be broken, financial losses may occur, etc. Web defacements can come in various forms, visual or non-visual (script inclusions). Hackers may...

In this video, we'll be discussing the important topic of preventing web defacement - a type of cyber attack that involves unauthorized alteration of a website's content or appearance. As a technical manager or CTO, it's crucial to understand the methods and motivations behind web defacement attacks and take steps...

“Planning without taking action is the slowest route to victory. Taking action without planning is the noise before defeat.” – Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Introduction to cloud computing

It is said that the world evolves at the speed of technological evolution. Organizations are constantly looking for new technologies such as cloud computing to meet their goals strategically and to drive business value. This article will address how cloud computing can possibly help organizations adopt efficient technologies and also improve productivity.

Cloud computing refers to computing on a network of remote servers accessible over the web, in order to store, manage, and process data. It utilizes computing resources of cloud providers, such as their data centers, instead of having the organization build their own local infrastructure.

Regardless of whichever industry one’s company belongs to (finance, retail or real estate), it is always advisable to understand the technology that other corporations are adopting. This is to solidify a competitive advantage by examining the lessons learned and best practises developed along the way.  In order to understand this better, let us illustrate how Netflix utilized cloud services to reach its level of success today.

Amazon Web Services used by Netflix

The cloud is an enabling technology for AI to mine and analyze data for deeply embedded insights. Cloud computing contributed an innovative breakthrough of accelerators for AI software. An accelerator is a class of microprocessor or system that is designed to provide hardware acceleration for AI applications such as neural networks, computer vision and machine learning. Currently, it is rather difficult for on-premise hardware to match the processing power of the accelerator hardware residing in the worldwide data centers of cloud providers (Source: Gartner, The Google Guys). Furthermore, cloud providers possess one more advantage over non-cloud AI: their extensive global network of data centers are in the better position to process the massive amount of data being generated all over the world. This alone makes it substantially easier to train machine learning models and neural networks for data insights and pattern recognition.

Analyzing customer data creates customer insights for any organization. It helps management avoid making assumptions about customers, which may be misinterpreted by the customer as apathy. Data analytics and personalized customer assistance (PCA) features are actually the largest areas of innovation on the cloud for organizations, up till 2019 (Source: InsideBigData, Google Cloud, IBM).

What sort of cloud services aid in discovering data insights and building personalized assistance features for customers? For one, Netflix uses Amazon RDS and DynamoDB, which provide the structural organization that these are cloud services that helps to build, develop and deploy custom machine learning models for each organization based on its unique goals and work environments.

While deciding whether to produce “House of Cards”, whereby 26 episodes cost $100 million in production, Netflix decided that it was more intelligent to use data analytics to determine which fan bases its new drama should target. These data were captured on their database for analysis. Using machine learning, they were targeting its marketing appeal at the fans of the British House of Cards, as well as the long-time fans of actor Kevin Spacey and director David Fincher.

With cloud-based AI services, organizations can index their entire product/service catalogue based on each customer/user’s profile. Age, location, gender, and other profile data helped to determine which products should be ranked first for each individual customer. Customers with different likings and profile data would see a personalized set of recommended products specially curated for their viewing. These personalized services tend to make users feel important and valued by the enterprise, instead of just being a source of revenue and hence retains the organisation’s customer base.

Cloud agility refers to the rapid provisioning of computer-related resources. The Cloud environment can usually provide compute instances or storage in minutes. Before cloud providers took off with IaaS, one had to email infrastructure suppliers and wait for a few weeks before the supplier replied with the requested provisions. (Source: Netflix, Amazon Case Study on Netflix). The existing IaaS delivery is executed using the consoles of cloud providers, allowing a faster release of new features for users. The benefit of such services reduce the time taken to develop, test and deploy software applications.

Most successful companies share a common trait: they had people who started developing a product/service prototype way ahead of their peers. The reason for their success is rather obvious – the first-mover advantage. Cloud computing is a technology designed to help organizations obtain the first-mover advantage, as evident from their rich variety of service offerings.

How did Netflix utilize agility features of the cloud for the cloud migration of their operations? They rebuilt their app functions inside the native cloud development environments first, later including app development for business operations. The large, cumbersome Netflix service of 2008 was refactored into microservices and unstructured scalable databases.

Netflix’s cloud database usage followed a pay-as-you-use basis, which helped them save costs whenever they rolled out the AI based feature called top personalized recommendations. (the AI has to mine data from their database, and so the database has to be hosted properly and securely on Amazon’s cloud). This AI feature, top personalized recommendations, showed users niche titles that would not be available on traditional cable networks but were similar to content liked by the user. As such, users purchased these niche titles more, generating more revenue; Netflix no longer had to spend so much money on acquiring new content to sell to users. The costs saved were estimated to be $1 billion by Netflix’s Vice President and Chief Product Officer, in a research paper published by them.

With such a progressive implementation, the management became more strategic and informed about budget evaluations and approvals. The purchase of hardware and the progressive release schedule of the re-morphing Netflix became more streamlined day by day. Gradually, a large organization like Netflix was no longer constrained by physical compute-resources and grew to become the global Internet TV network everyone knows today.

Scalability

Scalability refers to a software-based product or service which retains its intended function with no quality compromise when moved to an environment with more incoming customers. The user’s needs must be met no matter what changes and the response time should not get longer. The elaborations below highlight the relevance of cloud scalability to your organization.

By using services from cloud providers like AWS and Open Connect (for streaming), Netflix expanded its network of servers (both physical and virtual) from North America to the rest of the world, including areas like Europe and India.

Netflix is one example of an organization using the cloud. By running on AWS, it provided billions hours of service to customers around the globe. Users can order its products/services from almost anywhere in the world, using PCs, tablets, or mobile devices. 10,000 customer orders were processed every second during Netflix’s last peak demand season. This is a stark contrast from the few thousand DVD orders Netflix could handle in its early days before streaming and migrating to the cloud. Having 86 million customers worldwide who consume 150 million hours of content daily, this is rather strong evidence about how the cloud has powered Netflix’s scalability of business operations.

Cloud providers like AWS provide technologies such as container auto-scaling and application level load-balancing, to support the customer service that Netflix provides. Cloud providers possess the resources to handle the gigantic operational loads of their client organizations. The compute resources they provide are globally available, enabling customers from around the world to place orders literally anytime they prefer. Organizations that face a small home-country market no longer have to worry about global expansion.

Conclusion and Final thoughts

The most important action taken by enterprise organizations in 2018 was to engage a professional cloud vendor experienced in providing step-by-step solutions and enterprise-level cybersecurity.

Enterprise innovation is now centered upon (but not limited to) cloud-native machine learning models and data analytics. These technologies offer a pleasant side benefit, assisting organizations in managing their vast amount of customer and operations-related data. In the area of enterprise agility, cloud providers and third-party resellers have created intelligent software so as to help enterprises make important decisions faster than ever. In the area of scalability, the cloud has empowered various organizations to serve their users and customers around the world with better availability and response times. Selling to more customers beyond the home-country is now easier.

It is important for organizations to understand global industrial changes. The future of the cloud computing will continue to be several billion dollar industries, such as AI innovation, blockchain and cloud security (Source: Forbes). Hence, most organizations now find their boardroom discussions increasingly centered upon the topic of technology  in business strategy.

“Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win”

― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

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Current: Preparing teenagers for financial responsibility

About Current

Current is a financial technology company that offers a debit card and app made for teenagers. The app and card give teens hands-on learning with modern financial tools, and connects them with the people, brands, and experiences they value.

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Current uses google kubernetes engine on google cloud to improve time to market for app development by 400% while eliminating downtime for users of its debit card app., google cloud results.

• Improves time to market for app development by 400%
• Eliminates downtime for customers
• Enables deployment of new services in hours versus days
• Reduces total cloud hosting costs by 60%

80% reduction in error resolution time

When it comes to developing good financial habits, it pays to start early. Talking to teens about money and monitoring how they spend it helps set them up for a more financially sound future and can have long-term implications for the rest of their lives.

Instead of handing teens cash, many parents are using Current , a Visa chip debit card and smartphone app that helps teens learn how to budget money. Teens can set savings goals, check their balances, earn money by completing chores, and even give to charity. Parents can set an automated allowance, create and approve chores, and easily track their children’s spending with real-time alerts.

To grow, Current must keep its app secure, reliable, and high performing. As a startup, the company started by developing and hosting its app on a simple infrastructure, managing virtual machines with manual processes. As its user base surpassed 25,000 daily active customers, Current began to notice performance bottlenecks, particularly with the Neo4j graph database it uses to store and expose relationships among users, family members, and their debit cards and connected banks. Running the database on a shared application server made it difficult to measure the cost of the required CPU time and memory footprint. Current also lacked a robust way to log and profile the database.

Current considered using a hosted Neo4j solution, but worried that it would limit its ability to deploy in different availability zones as the company grew. Current was also concerned that a hosted solution would drastically increase costs.

“Since moving to Google Cloud, we’ve been able to sustainably grow our user base 7x to more than 175,000 users, and we haven’t experienced any downtime for our services. We’ve also received a lot of collaboration and support from Google, which we weren’t getting from other cloud providers.”

After a short stint with another cloud provider, Current decided to build its own graph database cluster on Google Cloud . The highly available implementation—including a monitoring agent and backup agent—came in at half the cost of a hosted solution or alternative cloud provider according to Trevor Marshall, Chief Technology Officer at Current. Once the engineering team saw the power and reliability of Google Cloud, Current began exploring deeper integration with Google Cloud services.

“Since moving to Google Cloud, we’ve been able to sustainably grow our user base 7x to more than 175,000 users, and we haven’t experienced any downtime for our services,” says Trevor. “We’ve also received a lot of collaboration and support from Google, which we weren’t getting from other cloud providers.”

Accelerating time-to-market

Current now hosts most of its applications in Docker containers, including its business-critical GraphQL API, using Google Kubernetes Engine to automate cluster deployment and management of containerized applications while keeping applications available. Container images are stored on Google Container Registry for fast, scalable retrieval. Integrated logging with Google Stackdriver makes it easy to identify issues, and Current can scale up or down as needed to keep performance high and costs low, with zero downtime for users.

“Moving to Google Cloud reduced our error resolution times by 80% and improved our time to market for app development by 400%. We can iterate quickly, find issues, and redeploy. There’s no reason whatsoever to run Kubernetes outside of Google Cloud, because Google does such a good job.”

With a fully managed environment for containerized applications, Current can deploy new services in hours instead of days while keeping its staffing footprint small. When the company does add team members, they can focus on app development instead of managing and troubleshooting infrastructure.

“Moving to Google Cloud reduced our error resolution times by 80% and improved our time to market for app development by 400%,” says Trevor. “We can iterate quickly, find issues, and redeploy. There’s no reason whatsoever to run Kubernetes outside of Google Cloud, because Google does such a good job.”

Current has released a variety of compelling new features since moving to Google Cloud, including a referral program to recruit more customers and an improved notification feed to inspire more conversations about finances between parents and teens. It also restructured its app to highlight users’ favorite features, including a dedicated allowance section and improved chore management. The new app also communicates with Current’s Kubernetes Engine hosted GraphQL API. Current’s use of GraphQL greatly improves performance by minimizing the data that is sent between the app and the backend, and enables Current’s front-end engineers to share code, increasing developer efficiency.

Improving data and network security

As a financial technology company, Current is always focused on providing the highest levels of security for its customers. Google Cloud facilitates the use of encryption to help protect customer data at rest and in transit to help ensure that customer data is safe when outside the physical boundaries not controlled by Google or on behalf of Google.

For publicly accessible applications, Current configures an ingress resource on Kubernetes clusters to make context-aware load balancing decisions. This ingress also provides a reverse proxy function between users and Current's private network. This helps ensure that no external entity can reach Current’s Google Compute Engine instance fleet directly. Google Cloud also provides Current with the means to forward traffic outside of its private without exposing instances to the public Internet. This gives Current the means to utilize other managed services such MongoDB Atlas, while maintaining a trusted platform.

“Security is one of the biggest benefits of Google Cloud and Kubernetes Engine,” says Trevor. “It was easy for us to configure our environment so that we avoid exposing any public IP addresses for our clusters. When we deploy a new service, we have a recipe that observes security best practices.”

“Google Cloud has allowed us to be highly available, scalable, and cost-efficient, helping us grow from an ambitious startup into a financial technology innovator. We’ve built trust with the families we serve because we’ve been able to offer a great experience.”

Powering a digital workforce

When Current was founded in 2015, the company standardized on Google Workspace for communication and collaboration, using tools such as Gmail and Google Docs , Sheets , and Slides to keep productivity high. Google Workspace administration is so easy that Trevor still handles it all, in addition to leading the company’s tech strategy as CTO.

“Our business depends on Google Workspace,” he says. “It’s simple to use, yet feature-rich and very cost effective. Adding new employees takes a couple of minutes, and they can get to work right away. I can’t imagine using anything else.”

Shaping financial futures

By making it easy for teens and parents to manage and talk about money, Current is preparing a new generation to navigate one of the most challenging aspects of adulthood: financial responsibility. The company’s user base is growing by 20% every month with no signs of slowing, and its Android app just began trending on Google Play. Current is also learning to better manage its own finances. “By avoiding the cost of a hosted Neo4j solution and optimizing resource utilization with Kubernetes Engine, we reduced total cloud hosting costs by 60%," adds Trevor.

“Google Cloud has allowed us to be highly available, scalable, and cost-efficient, helping us grow from an ambitious startup into a financial technology innovator,” says Trevor. “We’ve built trust with the families we serve because we’ve been able to offer a great experience.”

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InfoQ Homepage News Building SaaS from Scratch Using Cloud-Native Patterns: A Deep Dive into a Cloud Startup

Building SaaS from Scratch Using Cloud-Native Patterns: A Deep Dive into a Cloud Startup

Apr 18, 2024 4 min read

Steef-Jan Wiggers

Infoq article contest.

A robust and extensible Cloud platform is the foundation for building and distributing powerful Software as a Service (SaaS). It provides a common layer upon which you can quickly iterate to deliver specialized services to meet the needs of your end users.

Joni Collinge , Diagrid's Founding Software Engineer, presented at QCon London and discussed a case study on the evolutionary design and implementation of the Diagrid Cloud platform , which underpins Diagrid’s SaaS offerings.

Cloud platforms such as Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Azure , and Amazon Web Services (AWS) are essential for delivering Software as a Service (SaaS) due to their capabilities in self-service, multi-tenancy, scalability, and elasticity. These platforms enable developers to use high-level coding patterns and bootstrap their applications effectively, supporting a cloud-agnostic environment that accommodates technologies like Kubernetes (K8s), MySQL , and Redis . A significant advantage of using these cloud services is maintaining a multi-cloud strategy, as seen in the Diagrid model, which helps manage egress costs and ensures compliance by keeping data portable across various regions.

To effectively manage these cloud environments, the design of the control plane is crucial. This includes developing a robust API strategy using Cloud APIs, Cloud Control API, and ARM API, designed to streamline resources' exposure and management. The Kubernetes Resource Model (KRM) and tools like OpenTofu and Terraform enhance resource management by providing structured templates and examples. Adopting a cell architecture and decentralized control through solutions like Kubernetes Control Plane (KCP) allows for scalable, elastic environments supporting complex multi-plane architectures. Integrating REST APIs and custom control options ensures that users and service providers have efficient and flexible control over their resources.

After the session, InfoQ interviewed Joni Collinge.

InfoQ: Given your experience leading the engineering efforts at Diagrid, how do you approach designing a cloud platform that meets current user and business needs and is adaptable to future requirements and technologies? Could you share specific strategies or design principles that have helped you ensure the platform remains extensible and maintainable as it evolves?

Joni Collinge: Building a Cloud Platform that can be easily extended to meet future use cases and evolve to support increased demand is a complex task. However, a deliberate design isolating machinery layers from business logic specifics can simplify this process. The machinery responsible for providing the mechanics of how to structure data generically, how it moves through the platform, and when logic operates on it should not handle specific implementation details. Instead, the business logic is mapped onto the machinery to provide the APIs and specialized processing logic to serve a particular set of use cases. This approach allows for the introduction of new implementations on top of the existing machinery when a new use case arises, eliminating the need to start from scratch. The API server in Kubernetes is an excellent example of achieving this separation. Its design has led to its use beyond its original scope in many cases. However, using it directly as a general-purpose Cloud API server can be challenging and inefficient due to certain constraints in the Kubernetes system. Therefore, I recommend that others deconstruct its design, understand the founding principles that enable its extensibility, and identify its limitations. Once these principles are clear, you can search for similar characteristics in other places to help you build an extensible Cloud Platform that goes beyond the limits of Kubernetes.

InfoQ: You mentioned exploiting abstractions such as Kubernetes, Dapr, and Cloud-Native services. Can you elaborate on how these technologies contribute to achieving portability and extensibility in SaaS offerings?

Joni Collinge: There is a distinction between how you choose to host your Cloud Platform and the service your Cloud Platform provides. For instance, you may give your users a Kubernetes "like" API to manage their resources, but this does not necessarily mean you need to run your Cloud Platform on Kubernetes. Appreciating this difference is essential so you don’t limit yourself to trying to solve both problems simultaneously when they can be solved separately. If you want your Cloud Platform to remain portable across infrastructure, your code has to bind to APIs and execute on a runtime that is agnostic to the provider. Choosing which APIs and runtime you select is a decision driven by your specific requirements and constraints. However, as a start-up, it’s generally good advice to offload as much work as possible to your hosting provider by leveraging managed services. For us, this meant using Kubernetes for our runtime, MySQL for our database, and Redis for caching and streaming. The Dapr project can also help by abstracting your code from the underlying infrastructure, allowing you to bind to more productive Cloud APIs without sacrificing portability. For instance, you can use Dapr’s Pub/Sub API to perform asynchronous messaging against Redis or a higher-level service like AWS’s SQS with no code change required.

InfoQ: Additionally, are there any pitfalls or challenges that teams should be aware of when integrating these Cloud-Native technologies into their development process, especially when aiming for rapid adaptability in a competitive landscape?

Joni Collinge: My biggest concern when it comes to adopting Cloud-Native technologies is the increased level of complexity and fragmentation. Most Cloud-Native technologies have a compelling use case, but that does not mean they are necessarily valuable for your solution. Adopting any new technology should be driven by your own requirements and after doing due diligence to ensure its value. Don’t underestimate the mental tax you are charging your engineers by adopting technology for the sake of it.

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< Back to all customer stories

Pappaya Cloud

Building share in the multi-billion cloud market

To grow its managed cloud services business rapidly, Pappaya Cloud partnered with Lenovo TruScale Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) to deploy a platform based on Lenovo ThinkSystem servers powered by AMD EPYC™ processors.

“By partnering with Lenovo, we have a trusted partner to implement, manage and support the IT infrastructure that underpins our new managed cloud services. Whenever we’ve hit bumps in the road, Lenovo has worked tirelessly to support us—they’ve gone above and beyond to help us achieve our goals.”

Jagadeesh Venugopal

Chief Operating Officer, Pappaya Cloud

At-a-Glance

• Customer: Pappaya Cloud
• Industry: Technology
• Product Family: Servers
• Services: Truscale – Infrastructure as a Service
• Region: Europe,Asia Pacific,North America
• Processor: AMD
• Topic: Big Data and Analytics,High Performance Computing,Industry-specific Solutions,Cloud

Building share in the multi-billion-dollar cloud market

To grow its new managed cloud services business rapidly, Pappaya Cloud partnered with Lenovo TruScale Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) to deploy a platform based on Lenovo ThinkSystem servers powered by AMD EPYC™ processors.

Customer Problem

Pappaya Cloud set an aggressive growth target: to capture 2% of the global cloud market within five years. How can the company achieve its goal?

Lenovo Solution

With Lenovo TruScale IaaS, Pappaya Cloud gains access to proven Lenovo hardware and high-performance AMD EPYC™ processors via a flexible IT consumption model.

Business Impact

Pappaya Cloud has onboarded 2,000 customers to date—and rapid scalability from Lenovo will enable it to scale seamlessly towards the 2% market-share goal.

“With Lenovo TruScale IaaS solutions and high-performance AMD processors, we can rapidly deploy the latest datacenter hardware to build our new managed cloud services business.”

Jagadeesh Venugopal, Chief Operating Officer, Pappaya Cloud

• ·       Rapid scalability
• ·       24/7 monitoring
• ·       Excellent price/performance ratio

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Cloud computing – the first step to an effective data modernisation strategy

M any organisations realise the benefits that lie within the data they collect daily. This modern approach to data empowers businesses to leverage data for innovation and monetisation while at the same time enhancing security and privacy. While this may seem like a conundrum as companies have traditionally buried their data deep into IT architecture to prevent it from being accessible, even by the employees, today it is possible to have the best of both. This process starts with the cloud.

The wave of cloud migration across different sectors

The healthcare sector is witnessing a swift surge in cloud adoption. By 2028, it is expected to grow at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 18.74%. This trend of rapid adoption can be seen in the financial services sector too, where organisations are moving to the cloud at an accelerated pace.

One study revealed that 91% of organisations within the financial sector are either currently using cloud technology or planning to engage with it, marking a significant increase from the figures reported four years earlier.

Despite the escalating adoption of public cloud platforms, many organisations still express their concerns about the security and confidentiality of their data in the cloud environment. Uncertainty often arises about the extent of a cloud provider’s duty in safeguarding customer data, the destination of the data once migrated into the cloud as well as additional data security strategies beyond the public cloud vendors’ offerings.

To overcome this fear, there are four essential steps to consider when assessing the security of data in the cloud.

The advanced security measures of cloud providers

Public cloud providers play a pivotal role in maintaining a secure and resilient infrastructure. This encompasses maintaining secure data centres and ensuring their cloud services’ reliability and high availability. However, the role of these providers doesn't stop at infrastructure security. Though it falls upon customers to secure the data they transfer to the cloud, providers step up to offer a suite of optional security services. They provide users with enhanced data protection and access management control.

Adhering to data sovereignty in the cloud

In sectors where regulation is stringent, or in jurisdictions with tight controls on data privacy, maintaining compliance is vital. This is particularly important for businesses obligated to comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), as they must navigate stringent rules about the storage and transfer of customer information across borders. These organisations must ensure that any Personally Identifiable Information (PII) transferred to the cloud is handled in a manner that meets data sovereignty requirements. This includes limiting the ability to view sovereign data outside of the region.

Security certifications offered by the cloud providers

For many organisations, their cloud provider must adhere to specific security best practices and can demonstrate that they are compliant with security certifications relevant to their industry. For example, public sector and government organisations require that cloud providers are FedRAMP certified before moving data and workloads to the cloud.

Mastering compliance and security of data

The security capabilities offered by some cloud vendors are robust and for enterprises, these offerings are enough to satisfy their data security requirements. However, businesses that need superior data security may find it beneficial to collaborate with data protection vendors.

Such partnerships can significantly improve data integrity, offer more robust defence mechanisms against cyber threats, allowing the safe handling of sensitive data. It is especially important for organisations in highly regulated industries such as financial services, insurance, healthcare, and retail. Organisations in these fields often mandate complete data encryption before data migrates to the cloud. Therefore, once data is hosted in the cloud, these businesses need to implement the highest possible data protection standards to safeguard sensitive information, minimise breach risks and comply with industry regulations.

Navigating the cloud: a secure data utilisation

Organisations within different sectors can leverage cloud migration to significantly enhance operational efficiency. The transition of sensitive data to the cloud not only boosts data accessibility for businesses globally but also ensures the system’s ability to handle growing transaction volumes without compromising performance.

Therefore, they can migrate to the cloud securely to reap the benefits of a data-driven business that accelerates innovation, AI initiatives, and business intelligence. This modern approach to data not only empowers organisations to leverage data for innovation and monetisation it also helps to keep it secure from possible threats.

Alasdair Anderson is Vice President at Protegrity

"Cloud computing – the first step to an effective data modernisation strategy" was originally created and published by Retail Banker International , a GlobalData owned brand.

The information on this site has been included in good faith for general informational purposes only. It is not intended to amount to advice on which you should rely, and we give no representation, warranty or guarantee, whether express or implied as to its accuracy or completeness. You must obtain professional or specialist advice before taking, or refraining from, any action on the basis of the content on our site.