Intelligize
Intelligize is the leading provider of best-in-class content, exclusive news collections, regulatory insights, and powerful analytical tools for compliance and transactional professionals.
Intelligize offers a web-based research platform that ensures law firms, accounting firms, corporations and other organizations stay compliant with government regulations, build stronger deals and agreements, and deliver value to their shareholders and clients.
Headquartered in the Washington, DC metro area, Intelligize serves Fortune 500 companies, including Starbucks, IBM, Microsoft, Verizon and Walmart, as well as many of the top global law and accounting firms.
In 2016, Intelligize became a wholly-owned subsidiary of LexisNexis®, a leading global provider of content-enabled workflow solutions designed specifically for professionals in the legal, risk management, corporate, government, law enforcement, accounting and academic markets.
Challenge
- Reduce operational maintenance and focus on product development
- Align and Integrate with the other subsidiaries in the Organization
Solution Delivered to Meet Challenges
- Development partner from Day 1
- Migrated to AWS and reduced overall TCO compared to primary and DR data centers
- Adopted cloud native automation and CI/CD practices
- Microsoft Services
- IIS Web Services
- .Net Framework
- Windows Server
- Migrate to Managed services and refactored wherever possible
- MySQL to RDS
- File Server to S3
- Solr Search to AWS Elasticsearch
- Email Server to SES
- Auto scaling EC2
Vision
- Consolidated solution of similar products in the organization
- Business agility, new product development and features based on fast changing customer requirements
Benefits
- Lowered the overall TCO without external DR site
- Migrated some workloads as-is and optimized wherever applicable
- Leverage funding from the parent company to adhere to overall corporate Cloud strategy
Qualys cloud agent is installed on all the servers to have scans and access vulnerabilities. It is centrally managed.
Microsoft Services
- Microsoft IIS
- .Net Framework
- Windows workloads
AWS Services Used
- Amazon RDS for MySQL
- AWS EC2 Instances
- AWS ALBs
- AWS SSM
- AWS Route53
- AWS DynamoDB
- AWS ElasticSearch
- AWS Datalake
- AWS IAM
AWS services used for front end hosting
- AWS S3
- AWS CloudFront
AWS services used for monitoring
- AWS CloudWatch
- AWS Lambda
- AWS SNS
- AWS SES
AWS services used for infrastructure provisioning
- AWS CloudFormation
Following services are used for deployments
- AWS CodeDeploy
- AWS CodeBuild
Documentation
Requirements in this category relate to the documentation provided for each customer example.
Architecture diagrams
The root user is managed by the client. All the users have their own individual IAM users created.
Managed by the client side.
Operational Excellence
Requirements in this category relate to the ability of the APN Partner and the customer to run and monitor systems to delivery business value and to continually improve supporting processes and procedures.
CloudWatch default and custom metrics are used to determine the health of components of the workload.
CloudWatch dashboards and alarms are created to collect and analyze workload health metrics.
Dashboards
Alarms
Documents are created on Confluence to convey the operational processes.
Scenarios such as infrastructure management and monitoring, application monitoring, backups & restore, troubleshooting feed server, deployment prcess are covered
Testing is conducted by the QA team in QA environment and then in staging environment.
Builds are deployed using Jenkins.
BitBucket
CloudWatch logs, default metrics and custom metrics are used for infrastructure monitoring.
SumoLogic is used for applicatio logs.
Security – Identity and Access Management
Requirements in this category focus on best practices around AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) and other identity and access management systems owned by the APN Partner.
IAM roles and users are used for access management.
IAM roles are assigned least privileges
IAM roles are created and attached with EC2s.
And with Lambdas
- Each IAM user uses thier own AWS credentials.
- MFA is mandatory.
Security – Networking
Requirements in this category focus on security best practices for Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) and other network security considerations.
All security groups allow traffic on only the required ports by only the required source.
1. ALB traffic is encrypted using SSL.
2. SSL certificates are imported into the AWS Certificate Manager.
All the data stores are in the private subnets
Security – IT Operations
Requirements in this category focus on IT security operations best practices including logging, monitoring, incident response, and data classification.
1. Traffic to load balancer is encrypted.
2. SSL certificates are imported into the AWS Certificate Manager.
AWS API Integration
Requirements in this category deal with best practices around calling AWS APIs.
.Net SDK is used on application servers
Python library Boto3 is being used to call AWS APIs from Lambda functions.
Reliability
Requirements in this section focus on the ability of the APN Partner solution to prevent, and quickly recover from failures to meet business and customer demand.
Infrastructure is provisinoed using CloudFormation templates.
CICD is implemented using Jenkins, CodeBuild and CodeDeploy
RTO and RPO are 1 hour each.
RDS database is Multi-AZ.
AutoScaling is implemented for application servers.
Autoscaling is used to meet the increase in demand.
Cost Optimization
Requirements in this category relate to the APN Partner’s ability to help customers run systems that deliver business value at the lowest price point.
AWS pricing calculator were used to estimate the cost of major components.
Also got help from price charts for EC2s and RDS and other services to built the estimates.
Summary of estimates includes mainly the cost of EC2 instances, EBS, RDS, S3, Load Balancers, and VPC.
List of AWS services used to calculate infrastructure cost.
About NorthBay
We are a fast-growing, 100% AWS focused onshore/offshore AWS Premier Consulting Partner, supporting our customers to accelerate the reinvention of their applications and data for a Cloud-native world. Our >350 AWS Certified Employees excel in developing and deploying Database & Application Migrations, Data Lakes and Analytics, Machine Learning/AI, DevOps and Application and Data Modernization/Development that drive measurable business impact.
