Well-Architected Reviews result in optimal systems performance and security to improve the customer experience

About the Great Run Company

For over 40 years The Great Run Company has been creating mass participation sport events. Inspiring over 250,000 people each year to get and stay active, the business delivers £35m
of positive economic impact to the North East. As well as their own events, The Great Run Company works with corporates, charities, Local Authorities and Sports Governing Bodies, to consult on and deliver high quality event experiences.

 

The Challenge

As the UK’s biggest mass participation sports events company with 1.3m participants to date, The Great Run Company needed to better manage customer details and interactions for their ever-growing customer base.

Since the last new service update in 2018, The Great Run Company was aware the AWS landscape had grown significantly and along with it, the need
to ensure its two websites and CMS system were secure and performing at best. Keeping pace with new AWS services and security features would also allow the business to better inform customers and allow for new event registrations.

 

The Solution

CirrusHQ performed a Well-Architected Review on its websites, each hosted within a separate EC2 instance with different accounts for login, security, and various parts of the business. A second review was completed for their customer management system (CMS) to determine how it was performing, how to improve, and any best practice that could be applied.

The scope of the workload infrastructure review included enhancing the highly scalable architecture to provision capacity and meet demand faster. This was achieved by migrating non-production environments to a standalone AWS Account, reducing the blast radius, and strengthening security with zero-downtime deployment mechanisms that utilised immutable infrastructure. The project also included log offloading, and provisioning of CloudWatch Dashboards to accelerate operational investigations with tagging policy enforcement to track workload components and lifecycle management. Additionally, the review focused on rooting core fundamental account level security via a CirrusHQ Landing Zone, to automatically deploy a security baseline which now helps protect the organisation from the ground up.

 

The Benefits

  1. Better customer experience with reduced operational and downtime risk
    Single pane view of environment health and at-risk KPI alerts
  2. Peace of mind with increased security and performance
    Greater security controls with centralised account access management
  3. Bolstered AWS capabilities and consultative support
    In house skills boosted with CirrusHQ AWS expertise

 

“The review helped to implement best practices for governance and security while providing detailed support and guidance.”

Neil Gregory
Infrastructure Manager
The Great Run Company

 

About APN Partner CirrusHQ and Amazon Web Services

The Great Run Company were introduced to CirrusHQ by AWS as an Advanced Consulting Partner with the correct certifications and accreditations to assist them via the Well-Architected Framework. This framework was used to deliver an evaluation of their architecture’s key concepts and design principles and to implement architectural best practices for running workloads in the AWS Cloud.

A Review is designed to help organisations find opportunities for significant cost savings, improved application performance and reduced security risks.

 

Next Steps
To learn more about how AWS and APN Partner CirrusHQ can help your organisation, get in touch.