Case Study

A more effective infrastructure for InfoCert

Safe and reliable digitalization for its customers

The challenge

Due to the relevance of its business and the trust by its customers, InfoCert has to guarantee to the market the highest level of reliability and security; moreover since most of the datacenters and customers are entirely located in Europe, all services have to be provided under the European Regulations (GDPR and eIDAS).

InfoCert needed to quickly set-up a new additional infrastructure that could further improve the business continuity of their services, guarantee the same level of strong trust and data security to their customers, but at the same time, simplify the effort necessary to the deployment of new services, reduce the time-to-market and significantly decrease the effort necessary to the operation of the existing platform.

KEY DRIVERS

How to support the development team in adopting a DevOps approach, ensuring cost savings offered by a cloud platform and without tying up with a cloud provider.

Why Amazon Web Services

InfoCert worked side-by-side with Storm Reply, a Premier Consulting level member of the AWS Partner Network and some key stakeholders to create trust with the partner and the cloud provider. Storm Reply advised Amazon Web Services (AWS) for the reliability, efficiency and the cost-saving it is able to offer and collaborated in the design, implementation and kick-off of the new infrastructure.

The adopted approach is container-based; the solution can guarantee the portability of the services packaged under the form of Docker container, preventing at the same time the risk to be locked on the vendor. To further enforce this approach the container orchestration chosen is Kubernetes; that allows to standardize and make portable not only the container images but also the deployment configurations. Since Kubernetes is available as a managed service on most of the cloud providers, the usage of Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) shortened the time-to-market.

The VPC network, in conjunction with the Transit Gateway service and the Kubernetes vanilla Network Policies, allowed to implement a complex network and security design to enhance security of the services offered to the end-customer, implement a secure communication channel with the on-premise corporate data center and control the cost of the whole infrastructure.

The architecture leverages on Route53 as DNS service, on Elastic Load Balancers to distribute traffic to different Docker containers and on Amazon Aurora to make each application more resilient thanks to the Multi-AZ deployment.

Benefits

Since the launch of new AWS-based infrastructure, five core services have been migrated on the cloud and InfoCert is able to offer its services that requires a high availability with a very low RPO and RTO. The new infrastructure has improved the availability of the services offered in terms of business continuity and has allowed for a more precise governance and control of their applications. The AWS monitoring tools allows to constantly supervise the health of the system.
The flexibility and scalability of AWS are helping InfoCert to grow more rapidly.

InfoCert is the largest Certification Authority in Europe active in more than twenty countries. InfoCert enables companies to digitalize their business processes leveraging on our compliance expertise and our portfolio of trust-based solutions like eID, eDelivery, eSignature, eSeal and the award-winning TOP (Trusted Onboarding Platform) solution to assists companies to digitally onboard their clients. InfoCert manages millions of legally binding transactions per day across a variety of industries and business processes. We are trusted by thousands enterprise clients across Europe. InfoCert is a Qualified Trust Service Provider fully compliant with the requirements of the eIDAS Regulation and ETSI-EN-319-401 standards and an accredited provider of the digital identity for Italian citizens.

Storm Reply is the company in the Reply group specialized in the design and implementation of innovative Cloud-based solutions and services. Through consolidated expertise and many years of experience in the creation and management of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS), and Platform as a Service (PaaS) Cloud solutions, Storm Reply supports important companies in Europe and all over the world in the implementation of Cloud-based systems and applications.