CLIENT SUCCESS STORY
How Scorpion Five Technologies (S5T) prowess with legacy system modernization and enterprise system hardening helped modernize Alessa’s cloud distributed systems engineering approaches to increase profitability, technical capabilities, cybersecurity and drive customer value to new heights
Advanced capabilities in expert hands
Forged by securing classified systems.
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Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned
BY THE NUMBERS
1
Comprehensive Analysis of Infrastructure as Code approach to harden systems an increase cloud infrastructure automation capabilities
2
New security technologies to facilitate multitenant isolation and security: implicit deny service meshes, Kubernetes Pod admission policy enforcement
1
Extensible mono repo capable of supporting localized development of several dependent microservices that closely simulates the target architecture to spot security violations in dev
100%
Empowerment of senior developers to architect and develop efficient, powerful, and secure multitenant containerized systems orchestrated by Kubernetes
We recently engaged Scorpion Five Technologies to support our team at Alessa on our journey to modernize our cloud operations and elevate our cloud-engineering practices, and the experience has been outstanding. From the outset, S5T brought exactly the kind of expertise and insight you hope for when embarking on a multi-phase cloud transformation. For organizations on a similar path, looking to modernize their cloud infrastructure, strengthen cloud ops, and build internal capability, I would recommend Scorpion Five Technologies…
Holly Sais Phillippi
CEO, Alessa
THE SITUATION
Alessa’s advanced Anti-Money Laundering (AML) Compliance software empowers its customers with a comprehensive 360-degree view of client risk, covering everything from identity verification, to watchlist, sanction, and transaction monitoring.
Alessa SaaS services provide AML compliance support to a wide range of industries, including banks, casinos, FinTech firms, insurance companies, crypto, and much more.
Like most modern SaaS providers, Alessa must fight several tech battles at once. Cloud infrastructure has brought just as much cost increase as it has capability enhancements and cyber threats grow more intense with every passing day. What’s more, the needs of Alessa’s clients for advanced AML compliance capabilities have also increased dramatically, as money laundering schemes have exponentially advanced in technological sophistication.
KEY OBSTACLES
Despite the power and sophistication of Alessa products’ internal business logic, the architecture that supports that logic was built during a pre-cloud era and then later adapted to the cloud. In that era of development, monolithic architectures were the norm, as the benefits of shared resources provided by containerization and microservices architectures did not yet outweigh the costs of developing them for at least most systems and applications.
Furthermore, it is exceptionally difficult at an organizational level to support rearchitecting a system that customers are not only using, but who are employing the capabilities at a large scale. The senior developers and systems admins that deeply understand the product simply have their hands full. The moment you try to divert your attention to architecting the next generation system, the legacy system pulls your attention right back.
Alessa needed a way to architect a new multitenant system that could share resources, while still providing exceptional service to existing customers and keeping up with their growing AML demands.
OUR APPROACH
Driven by a commitment to innovation and future-ready technology for their clients, Alessa engineers had already made valiant efforts to modernize their systems and work towards multitenancy. Despite the difficulty of doing so, progress was being made. Alessa engineers are hardy and tenacious, but they needed more hands. That’s where S5T comes in.
WHAT WE DELIVERED
Using our experience engineering hyper-secure cloud systems deployed using automated provisioning and configuration management techniques, like Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and Configuration as Code (CaC), S5T provided Alessa with:
Alessa's business logic is robust and well developed, and only suffers from being monolithic in nature. Therefore the consult we provided was:
Alessa engineers were certainly not ignorant of microservice development, and had already managed to develop a few key services for their new architecture. S5T simply empowered them further by creating a model system in a mono repo for their inspection in a fully-local environment that demonstrated how to:
The most important aspect of the work S5T has done to empower Alessa engineers is that of multitenant hardening.
Although the resource sharing provided by containerization and Kubernetes-based container orchestration dramatically reduces cloud hosting costs compared to monolithic architectures, you must reproduce the complete separation of data and network traffic between clients' systems that monolithic architectures naturally provide. To endow Alessa with this capability, S5T taught their engineers how to:
THE IMPACT
We can sum up the impact S5T had on Alessa with a single word: empowerment. Alessa did not need S5T to teach them how to engineer advanced software—they have been doing that for years! What they needed was a clear roadmap to maximizing the power of their software using modern, containerized multitenant architecture in the cloud in a way that is cost effective.
Significantly enhanced cloud engineering capabilities to not only solve the modernization problems of today, but to engineer cloud capabilities for Alessa's future AML capabilities.
Experience-based insights that allow existing capabilities to modernized, made extensible, and continue to provide value.
Understanding of how to best-leverage the benefits of containerization modularity in distributed cloud architectures.
Advanced capabilities that allow for the costs savings provided by containerization and compute resource sharing, while also providing strict tenant isolation.
WHAT CLIENTS SAY
A premium med spa needed to escape vendor lock-in, rebuild their entire web presence in three weeks, and begin building toward HIPAA compliance. One PI owned every line of effort — from the emergency rewrite through the first compliance milestone.
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