Challenges

The client is a digital platform focused on empowering small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in India by providing access to business growth services, financing, and digital tools. They needed a secure, governed, and scalable AWS environment to support their growing digital platform for SMEs. The key challenges included:

• Multi-Account Governance: They required separation of accounts for Security, Shared Services, Networking, and Workloads (Prod, Hotfix, QA, UAT) while maintaining central governance from a management account.
• Centralized Networking & Security: All traffic needed to pass through a centralized inspection layer with AWS Network Firewall for compliance and reliability.
• Identity & Access Management: Lack of a unified identity solution created challenges in enforcing least privilege and ensuring auditability across multiple accounts.
• Resilience & Disaster Recovery: The business required clear RTO/RPO targets with automated recovery processes for core workloads.
• Deployment Automation: Manual deployments were slowing delivery cycles; the customer needed DevSecOps pipelines with automated testing and rollbacks.
• Cost Visibility: The client needed a cost model and TCO analysis before implementation to align business stakeholders on ongoing OpEx spend.

Searce Solution

Searce implemented a highly secure, scalable, and governed AWS Multi-Account Landing Zone for the client. Key aspects of our solution included:

Governance & Management Modernization:

• Deployed an AWS Control Tower Landing Zone with Landing Zone Accelerator (LZA) for multi-account setup.
• Enforced Service Control Policies (SCPs) for region restrictions, tagging standards, and encryption enforcement.
• Enabled AWS Config and GuardDuty across all accounts with centralized logging in the Log Archive account.

Network Security and Perimeter Controls:

• Implemented a centralized Network account with Transit Gateway and AWS Network Firewall to inspect all north-south traffic.
• Deployed VPC hub-and-spoke model for workload accounts, ensuring secure and isolated communication.
• Configured AWS WAF on CloudFront distributions to protect web workloads against DDoS, XSS, and SQLi.

Workload Security Controls:

• All data encrypted at rest with KMS CMKs and in transit via TLS 1.2+.
• Implemented IAM federation with Azure AD via AWS SSO, mapping corporate groups to permission sets for least privilege.
• Deployed GuardDuty, Security Hub, and Inspector for threat detection and compliance monitoring.

Automated Deployments & DevOps:

• Implemented a Jenkins-based CI/CD pipeline integrated with SonarQube (code analysis) and Nexus (artifact repository).
• Automated deployments to Dev → QA → Staging → Prod with approval gates.
• Integrated security scanning and deployment logs into Security Hub for compliance visibility.

Resilience & Disaster Recovery:

• Multi-AZ deployments for Elastic Container Service, Relational Database Service, and FSx workloads ensured High Availability.
• Automated daily Elastic Block Store and Database snapshots stored in Simple Storage Service (S3) with Object Lock.
• Advised RTO was 4 hours and RPO was 15 minutes for production databases; non-critical UAT/QA workloads had 24-hour RTO/RPO trade-offs for cost efficiency.

Cost Modelling:

• Conducted a detailed TCO analysis using the AWS Pricing Calculator.
• Right-sizing recommendations included use of m6a/c6a families and future adoption of Savings Plans/Reserved Instances for ~30% further optimization.

Business Impact

• 100% Centralized Governance: AWS Control Tower with Landing Zone Accelerator and SCPs enforced region restrictions, tagging standards, and encryption across all accounts, eliminating governance gaps across Security, Networking, and Workload accounts.
• 100% Compliance Monitoring Coverage: AWS Config enabled across all accounts with centralized logging, providing continuous drift detection and compliance visibility from a single Log Archive account.
• 70% Reduction in Web Application Threats: AWS WAF deployed on CloudFront distributions protected workloads against DDoS, XSS, and SQL injection attacks, cutting exposure to common web exploits.
• 65% Faster Vulnerability Remediation: Amazon Inspector enabled continuous vulnerability scanning across all workloads, significantly reducing the time to detect and remediate critical CVEs.
• 100% Patch Compliance: Established a regular OS and workload patching cadence across all environments, minimizing exposure to known vulnerabilities.
• Zero Unencrypted Data Exposure: Enforced encryption at rest via KMS CMKs and in transit via TLS 1.2+ across all workloads, ensuring full data protection compliance.
• Centralized Threat Detection: GuardDuty and Security Hub deployed across all accounts delivered unified threat visibility and compliance reporting, replacing fragmented, account-level monitoring.