RFD & Associates: AWS Cloud Offers Security and Scalability

RFD & Associates, Inc., is an IT Technical Services Company with over 30 years of experience delivering IT solutions to public and private sector clients.

RFD delivers IT solutions from Mainframe to Mobile and everything inbetween. They have helped hundreds of organizations design, build, purchase and implement optimal technology solutions to achieve business goals. RFD needed help designing and developing a scalable, Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud hosted, multi-tenant web and mobile friendly application. The proposed solution had a requirement to integrate with external APIs to ensure flexibility for future enhancements and integration with third-party tools. The application was also required to be compliant with Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and the U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) security.

Effectual Provided Guidance in the following areas

• AWS design and architectural services to include making RFD’s multi-tenant hosting environment PII/HIPAA compliant
• Provided AWS Training and best practices guidance on how to leverage AWS resources
• Assisted in helping RFD achieve its defined goals:
  • Identify the challenges presented in third-party hosting of AWS.
  • Evaluate the use of cloud services to meet RFD business and technical requirements.
  • Determine portable containerization services.
  • Evaluate architectural decisions in AWS Commercial and GovCloud Regions.

Our Approach

A four-phased approach was developed to implement an AWS hosted environment for RFD:

• Phase 1: Discovery, AWS Service Selection, and PII/HIPAA Security Requirements Determination.
• Phase 2: AWS Foundation Build. Provisioned appropriate environments and access; established AWS accounts
• Phase 3: AWS Service Build. Provisioned AWS services to include: EC2, Route53, S3, WAF, etc.
• Phase 4: Process Documentation and Environment Review. Created AWS documentation of resources and provided reports on overall solution, security and cost.

The Benefits

Auto-Scaling

We configured EC2 instances that are PII/HIPAA compliant ensuring adequate capacity to meet traffic demands and compute capacity. In addition, we implemented automated launch configurations to allow RFD to quickly launch and/or scale application severs in target environments in the future.

Security & Compliance

The implementation of AWS Compute, Storage, and PII and HIPAA compliant Database services to ensure the security of sensitive data used in the environment.

Monitoring Services

To maximize the functionality of many services, AWS CloudWatch was configured to help RFD set thresholds/alarms to monitor custom metrics for auto-scaling needs.