The Challenge

Ground Truth Intelligence (GTI), the global diligence and investigations platform, recently sought the help of Tech Amigos to transform its existing IT infrastructure and scale its platform in line with changing business needs.

The organisation’s transition from start-up to scale-up, resulting from an ever-increasing user base and the onboarding of new network partners, meant its underlying IT infrastructure had to evolve to meet new consumer demands. AWS cloud design from Tech Amigos ensured the core platform had the necessary flexibility, and resilience to support the next stage of their growth.

Challenges have included:

• A hand built AWS infrastructure made it difficult to maintain and evolve their environments
• Poor isolation between environments created unnecessary operational risks
• A lack of clearly defined Identity and Access Management policies and roles increased operational and reputational risks
• The poor reliability of the route-to-live process and automation pipelines decreased the team velocity
• Frequent post-release issues

The Solution

• Capture the GTI environment as infrastructure-as-code using Terraform, allowing controlled management of existing environments and ability to create new identical environments easily.
• Cleanly isolated dev, test and production environments
• Created reliable Gitlab pipelines for build-test-package-deploy based on a branch-per-environment model.
• Terraformed a role based security model helping to enforce a “principle of least privilege” for GTI to access their cloud environments.

Target state  that was delivered is depicted below