Case Study

AmpliFi Capital Seeks Resilience and Flexibility of Cloud to Expand Environment Capabilities

Industry: Finance

Solutions: Cloud Migration|Managed Services

Platform

AWS

AmpliFi Capital is a data-driven group of financial and strategic experts offering a turnkey solution for financial leadership and strategic execution. AmpliFi unlocks the potential of the middle market by making finance more accessible. They enable CEOs and business owners to manage how money is invested, measured, tracked, and sourced, through a unique approach to outsourced CFO services. Their spectrum of services supports the ambitious business owner, helping them allocate capital and other resources to achieve their vision.

AmpliFi specializes in using forward-facing finance strategies to help ambitious CEOs take their organization to the next level. Whether they’re facing issues in operations, challenges with IT, or looking for guidance to grow, AmpliFi enables them to manage by the numbers and make business decisions with confidence. AmpliFi approached Lightedge looking to find a managed services provider (MSP) who could help them build, manage, and maintain their infrastructure in AWS.

Challenge

AmpliFi had previous issues implementing new iterations of their application and wanted the ability to scale into entirely new deployments as required. AmpliFi was also looking for a platform that would allow them to easily provision new resources and provide interfaces for implementing and adhering to Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) practices for their environment.

Solution

Based on customer requirements, Lightedge worked with AmpliFi to design and implement a platform that would allow them the flexibility of an infrastructure that scales with their needs through the use of tools including AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Relational Database Service (RDS), and Elastic Block Storage (EBS). AmpliFi requested a solution where they would be free to leverage built-in solutions focused around scaling their capacity to fit their demands, and so decided to utilize the features of EC2 Autoscalingand the EC2 Application Load Balancer.

To ensure that the implemented AWS solution is appropriately monitored and managed with straightforward and powerful features, Lightedge implemented AWS native solutions which included Cloudtrail and Config allowing AmpliFi to examine and audit changes and activity. Lightedge also enabled Cloudwatch to log activity for events such as VPC traffic to create an auditable log and facilitate troubleshooting of any issues. In addition to these AWS services, Lightedge also enabled services for AmpliFi using Blue Matador monitoring which uses predictive algorithms to continuously surveil the environment for anomalies. Lightedge worked with AmpliFi to determine both their immediate needs and their long-term goals for their infrastructure, including their requirements for an infrastructure that would be documented as it was maintained utilizing IaC practices as well as allowing for recovery should operations be impacted.

To manage the infrastructure of this solution, Lightedge assisted AmpliFi in leveraging an AWS native IaC solution using AWS CloudFormation. The teams determined that CloudFormation provided the functionality needed while allowing AmpliFi to maintain self-documentation efforts in their environments. Of particular importance to AmpliFi, the CloudFormation implementation designed by Lightedge meets both current requirements and is also designed with considerations in place for future expansion.

Results

Working in the AWS cloud platform, Lightedge was able to provide AmpliFi with robust and secure infrastructure according to AWS Best Practices, along with a blueprint, leveraging AWS CloudFormation, that remained resilient in present-day needs and requirements and flexible to allow changes and expansions of capabilities in the future. AmpliFi continues to engage Lightedge regularly to address any operational needs and architectural recommendations on how best to leverage AWS-powered infrastructure solutions in the future.