Chartered Accountants Australia and New Zealand – AWS Data Lake Implementation & Managed Services

Customer Profile

The Chartered Accountants Australia and New Zealand is the operating name for the Institutes of Chartered Accountants in Australia and New Zealand. Chartered Accountants ANZ represents over 117,112 members in Australia, New Zealand and overseas.

The Chartered Accountants Australia and New Zealand is a member of the International Federation of Accountants and is connected globally through the 800,000-strong Global Accounting Alliance and Chartered Accountants Worldwide which supports and promotes over 320,000 Chartered Accountants in more than 180 countries

The Challenge

The client was in the need of ingesting a vast amount of operational data from the existing applications that could be consolidated for analysis and insights. Big Data platform was needed that could easily ingest data and ensure there is plenty of computing power to drive real-time and actionable insights and produce results within seconds.

The Solution

With Blazeclan’s AWS Big Data competency and certified team of Solution Architects, in 8 weeks we designed and implemented Amazon Web Services (AWS) foundation platform for ingestion, data storage, process and consumption along with AWS Technology partner Bryte.

• The solution was designed with a strong emphasis on security including GDPR compliance that was achieved using Blazeclan GDPR scan tool – Cloudlytics.
• The solution was further configured for the BryteFlow application.
• Deployment of the EMR cluster was automated to use the environments on demand, with infrastructure setup using Cloud Formation.
• VPN and AD were integrated with the wider The Chartered Accountants Australia and New Zealand environment.
• RStudio was also deployed for the internal team to perform analysis and generate insights on the data.
• Using Blazeclan’s Cloud Management Platform (CMP), the team ensured 24*7 monitoring of the AWS infrastructure and management of the solution, database, security and the administrative tasks. The expert staff made the automated onboarding process hassle-free and smooth with custom reports for actionable insights.

The Benefits

• Fast insights: Data lake platform can support diverse data source ingestion for better data correlation, and analytical model building which will drive actionable insights.
• Simplified data analysis: The customer team now spends less time managing the data pipeline and more time focusing on analytics to draw actionable insights.
• Zero downtime: Having moved the application to the AWS Cloud and proactive monitoring of our AWS infrastructure ensured zero downtime.
• Unpredictable traffic volumes are easily handled: The platform can cope with extreme spikes in traffic using AWS.
• Improved efficiency: Saved 50% of the time through the use of Templated provisioning through CloudFormation as compared to the manual activity.
• Improved security and compliance: With robust control policies, real-time security auditing and compliance, Chartered Accountants Australia and New Zealand were able to meet GDPR compliance obligation with a healthy rating.

Tech Stack

• Amazon EC2 was used for computing capacity management for their application deployment. It helped in reducing the time required to spin up new server instances to minutes, allowing them to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as per their requirement.
• Amazon Redshift service was used to manage all of the work of setting up, operating, and scaling a data warehouse.
• Amazon S3 was used to store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere and everywhere.
• AWS EBS was used to provide persistent block storage volumes for use with Amazon EC2 instances in the AWS Cloud.
• AWS KMS was used to create and control the encryption keys used to encrypt data.
• Amazon EMR was used to manage the cluster platform that simplifies running big data frameworks, such as Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark, on AWS to process and analyze vast amounts of data.
• AWS CloudTrail enabled governance, compliance, operational auditing, and risk auditing of the AWS account.
• Amazon DynamoDB was used for all applications that required consistent, single-digit millisecond latency at any scale.
• AWS Athena was used which is an interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL.
• AWS NAT Gateway was used to allow instances on a private subnet to connect to the Internet or to other AWS services.
• AWS API Gateway was used as a managed service that makes it easy for developers to create, publish, maintain, monitor, and secure APIs at any scale.

Customer Testimonial

Blazeclan is our strategic cloud partner with fantastic capability and experience. They worked collaboratively with our internal teams and partner Bryte to design and deliver the AWS data lake solution, I was impressed with their knowledge and expertise.

Sanjeev Gupta, CIO, Chartered Accountant – Australia & NZ