Customer Overview

Simplifying Compliance with Accelerated Deployment Marco Polo Securities (MPS) is a US-based FINRA, SEC and NFA regulated broker-dealer specializing in providing compliance access solutions for cross-border marketing and distribution of financial products under SEC reg 15-a6, known as “Chaperoning”. Marco Polo Securities has created and leverages an on-line portal called MPS Passport, which helps simplify regulatory reporting requirements. Through the chaperoning service, they assist Foreign Financial Institutions (FFIs) to sell and market private securities, research reports, organize roadshows and conferences, and facilitate and execute transactions to make sure they comply with US regulatory requirements. Marco Polo Passport makes marketing their products and services and, maintaining their books and records easier while complying with regulatory standards.

Business Challenge

The MPS Passport platform was built on AWS ECS Fargate to manage containerized applications better. But its management and the monitoring of applications and infrastructures to run them optimally was a challenge. MPS also needed assistance to optimize their costs of running these infrastructures and applications. Additionally, they were struggling to manage the multiple logs from cluster deployment. MPS wanted to incorporate monitoring, logs, metrics, and incident reporting into its IT infrastructure as well as to automate certain key processes and improve the overall digital experience of its users. Using cloud-native technologies would simplify such issues. They also wanted guidance on whether to stick with their original ECS setup with Amazon EC2 instances or switch over to Amazon Fargate, a serverless computing launch typedesigned for containers. MPS wanted an AWS cloud expert and connected with Cambridge Technology through the AWS Partner Network, as we had a SaaS competency and were part of AWS MSP partner program. MPS also clarified that they needed infrastructure and applications with metrics reporting from CT’s monitoring platform along with managing continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) for ECS deployments. Additionally, they sought to add the log management functionality down at the cluster level using ELK to pipe logs to Elasticsearch so that all the logs are consolidated in a centralized location and can be viewed through interactive dashboards built on Kibana.

Transformation Story

Our Managed Services team began by collating MPS’ success metrics and evaluating the existing IT infrastructure. By collaborating with application development team, the team understood the deployment process and set up a CI/CD code pipeline to streamline development and release processes. This helped in making shipping of business critical features and reach markets faster. Along with this, they configured the global log forwarding on the entire Fargate cluster to avoid the issue of displaced logs. With this, MPS teams had a way to bring all the logs in a centralized location by setting-up transparent processes along with tracking and monitoring all the customer transactions. Our Managed Services team also managed the scalability of AWS ECS Fargate Clusters. We enabled auto-scaling, at the service level, by choosing target tracking auto-scaling policy based on ECS service metrics. This automation made sure the tasks are scaled-in or scaled-out as required without interruptions. The team used Amazon CloudWatch with Prometheus and enabled anomaly-detection to gather application metrics and increase visibility into container performance and application health. This also helped MPS track spending across their AWS environments.

Results

With the environments simplified and the right integrations in place, MPS gained the clarity it needed to see how well their AWS ECS and the overall cloud environment design performed. With our highly available and reliable platform constantly monitoring the AWS infrastructure, MPS could track their infrastructure resource utilization more closely to ensure high performance and leaving room to divert focus to business-critical matters. The project also helped MPS maintain the integrity of containerized applications, thereby speeding up time-to-market. It boosted scalability and seamlessness for their platform services while maintaining 99.99% uptime for applications.

Optimized Costs

One of the biggest advantages that MPS witnessed was the cost optimization. One of the efforts made for this was taking a hard look at the logs being generated. After reviewing it, the Managed Services team found that more logs were being created than necessary. This meant more storage and unnecessary data to process. The team didn’t just fine-tune the process to generate logs only for necessary actions, but also monitored it continuously to optimize it. Additionally, the team resized the instances based on workloads and stopped non-production environments during non-business hours. Since the team had also reviewed MPS’ infrastructures based on the AWS Well-Architected Review principles, they could reduce AWS’ configuration charges. The efforts resulted in increasing savings for MPS by 30-40% in their monthly billing. As a result, MPS could meet their goals for their infrastructure cost and create an easily scalable, highly available, cutting-edge, and secure IT ecosystem. Their visibility over their systems meant they could solve anomalies faster while helping their customers better meet their compliance needs, seamlessly within a unified platform.