Competition and the ever-changing customer demands in the business world are forcing organisations large and small to rethink their digital strategies. The Coronavirus health pandemic (COVID-19) has also not helped the situation, with employees as well as customers now working remotely, thereby disrupting traditional business models.
In order to survive, any business needs scalability and agility in handling growing resources to meet business demands in a capable way. Scalability refers to the idea of a system in which every application or piece of infrastructure can be expanded to handle increased load.
Until its engagement with Amazon Web Services (AWS), lack of scalability was one of the biggest issues impacting Johannesburg-based business intelligence solutions provider Blue Pearl.
Blue Pearl’s core service offerings range from business intelligence (BI) to big data and data analytics. The company strives for perfection and aims to be one of the best BI companies in South Africa and globally. Through the use of powerful data visualisation tools, Blue Pearl ensures the best decision-making within organisations.
The company is highly-skilled in developing BI solutions that utilise the latest technologies, standardised processes and advanced technical capabilities. Coupled with thorough consultation, these efforts ensure the success of clients.
Blue Pearl operates in industries like health, financial services, logistics, banking, as well as professional services. It has leading clients such as Discovery, Transnet, Absa, Nedbank, EY and Deloitte among others.
With this growing clientele base, the company faced the challenges of scalability, security and service availability. It believes that data is among the most valuable intangible assets for businesses, and some would argue that it is the most valuable asset in business as a whole.
The company then deployed AWS technologies in response to some of these challenges. AWS as a platform has scalability built in. It offered services that helped Blue Pearl set up application scale up or down depending on the resource requirements.
With AWS, the company is also now able to protect its data, accounts, and workloads from unauthorised access, something that a lot of organisations are grappling with, especially in this age where cyber criminals are becoming more sophisticated.
AWS data protection services provide encryption and key management and threat detection that continuously monitors and protects accounts and workloads.
Also to Blue Pearl’s advantage, AWS has opened a cloud region in Cape Town, allowing customers to run applications and store data in South Africa. These data centres comply with local security and data protection laws, including the Protection of Personal Information (POPI) Act, which came into effect on 1 July 2020.
For Saireshan Govender, Chief Executive Officer of Blue Pearl, AWS’ start up consumption credits allocated significantly assisted Blue Pearl in getting the platform online quickly. He says in a space of just four months, AWS services were deployed at Blue Pearl. In that time frame, the company launched a fully scalable and commercially viable platform.
Govender is also impressed by the AWS Elastic Beanstalk product, which he testifies, helped speed up the platform from 40 seconds load time to a 3 seconds load time. AWS Elastic Beanstalk is an easy-to-use service for deploying and scaling web applications and services developed with Java, .NET, PHP, Node.js, Python, Ruby, Go, and Docker on familiar servers such as Apache, Nginx, Passenger, and IIS.
AWS Elastic Beanstalk Blue Pearl could simply upload code and Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment, from capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling to application health monitoring.
At the same time, Blue Pearl also retains full control over the AWS resources powering their application and can access the underlying resources at any time. Additionally, there was no additional charge for Elastic Beanstalk you pay only for the AWS resources needed to store and run your applications.
Time to market is another biggest advantage from AWS. Now Blue Pearl consultants can sell their hours to clients faster, while its clients reduce turnaround to hire consultants from three months to just 24 hours.
Furthermore, the AWS platform also enabled Blue Pearl’s end users to sign up quicker, with the company also a significant increase in the number of users signing in.
With AWS in its corner, Blue Pearl can now achieve its mission to strategically combine technology, business applications and highly experienced and insightful consultants can help clients successfully achieve their business goals.