Target Professional Services

Customer Quote

“I am very impressed with the work that GlobalLogic undertook to not only carry out the AWS Well-Architected Review, but also the remediation of our AWS Cloud Estate. GlobalLogic proved to be good listeners who sought to understand not only our immediate needs but our aspirations as well.

We wanted to enhance our journey into the cloud and chose GlobalLogic to deliver the AWS Well-Architected review. With their team of skilled consultants, we were walked through each step of the Well- Architected Framework, understanding the value this would have to our business stakeholders and customers. Once we knew where we were in our journey, GlobalLogic helped develop a plan to address the gaps and executed on that plan to apply controls to support and govern our environment.

I particularly liked the daily 10-minute huddles that covered off yesterday’s progress, issues discovered and fixed along the way, as well as today’s goals. This meant we were aligned every step of the way and were able to steer the project to achieve, not only what GlobalLogic had agreed to do, but also many other smart engineering improvements they chose to undertake whilst they had the bonnet up.

Great progress, great value and a wishlist of minor issues that we can now address ourselves. Oh and 2 x $5k of AWS credit awarded because of the significant leap forward we made in Security, Compliance and Scalability.

Lessons learnt include not to put out to tender and settle for the keenest price. GlobalLogic got much more done and to a smarter and higher standard in a massively shorter period than any team we have used up until now. As a result of this successful engagement, we have identified a partner we can work with in the future, and we have an environment that is optimized for our customers’ journey.”

— Head of Compliance, Target Professional Services

The Solution

You don’t know what you don’t know, which is why GlobalLogic approached the engagement with an architectural assessment that would provide a health check of Target Professional Services cloud services. Otherwise known as an AWS Well-Architected Review, this review enabled us to impartially review the client’s cloud architecture and offer a detailed 1:1 consultation and recommendations. These recommendations included user stories to demonstrate what the solution would look like, as well as an order of priority. We highlighted items that were a risk and/or activity that could be grouped and tackled together – the two birds, one stone approach.

In particular, Target Professional Services asked GlobalLogic to investigate two applications – mypensionID and Apollo CRM – along with the AWS platform in its entirety. Each being data rich and with global reach, Target Professional Services couldn’t afford any outages or security breaches and were extremely vigilant when it came to any interfaces integrated with the app’s infrastructure.

GlobalLogic’s review identified several improvements that could directly improve the reliability and security of the applications and align Target Professional Services to the AWS Well-Architected Framework best practices. We set out a program of work over 12 days and dropped in a team of engineers to work through the scope of work agreed. This scope included:

• Creating a centralized governance of all AWS accounts, to help manage cloud-associated costs across the business
• Introducing a more sophisticated monitoring capability with varying alarms and notifications
• Maximizing the scalability of the platform
• Remediating configuration drift between Infrastructure as Code and the deployments
• Introducing AWS best practices to strengthen security,
• Removing resources no longer used but being charged for. 

The Outcomes

Over the project, GlobalLogic helped Target Professional Services scale and manage its existing applications and increase reliability and performance to secure any future applications they want to deploy on to the platform. Greater visibility has also enabled Target Professional Services to demonstrate with more clarity how they manage and govern their environments – a common question from new customers.

Key benefits include:

• Centralized governance of all AWS accounts and centralized billing – including enforcing strong password policies, single sign-on with MFA, least privilege access, encryption at rest, key rotation, and automated patching
• Improved the Security Hub score by more than 60 percentage points against AWS Foundational Best Practices for all of Target Professional Services applications
• Implemented Tagging policy coupled with Cost and Usage reports to improve visibility into AWS spend
• Complete visibility of the entire environment – mitigating the scope of potential risks to Target Professional Services upcoming application
• A personalized monitoring dashboard with data analysis and incident monitoring
• Fixed configuration drift between Infrastructure-as-Code and manual deployments
• Brought non-production environments in line with production which allows new integrations to be made in a seamless manner
• An AWS financial service credit of $10,000 ($5k per app) for Target Professional Services