Continuous Success with Well-Architected: Ecospend

Ecospend is an industry-leading technology company that delivers pure open banking solutions. Ecospend is the open banking service provider with the most bank integrations in the UK, providing both PIS and AIS (payment initiation services and account information services). Their open banking gateway provides a pure API solution.

To achieve their business goals of expanding their reach and providing the best value for their customers, they sought expert guidance to review and improve their infrastructure for continuous success in the cloud. Sufle helped Ecospend to assess and improve their infrastructure according to industry best practices with the help of the AWS Well-Architected Framework.

Next-Gen Open Banking Technologies in One Platform

Ecospend’s next-generation open banking solutions help businesses of all scales leverage financial service technologies through payment and data services. The platform enables their customers to initiate secure payments, access qualified data, gain insights and drive business performance. Clients can also integrate their data from various financial service providers to monitor and analyze their financial status in real time and take effective actions through ML based account spending analyses and risk management.

Challenge: Providing Continuous Value with a Solid Architecture

Being connected to 50+ banks in the UK including the top global banks, Ecospend serves thousands of customers across Europe. As they aim to expand their reach and grow their user base, they need a solid foundation for their infrastructure to meet increasing demand. In line with their expansion strategy, their market position also requires them to ensure operational success in the cloud through high availability and reliability. One of the unique value propositions of the company is that they help their customers accelerate time-to-market with fast and secure open banking services. So, having an architecture that encourages agility to operate faster and more efficiently is an important success factor for Ecospend.

Besides the need for operational performance, continuous security and compliance practices are also essential in such a sensitive industry of financial services. To improve all aspects of their current infrastructure and implement advanced practices for further success, the Ecospend team wanted to gain a strong understanding of their architecture and operational processes. This largely scoped analysis and improvement plan required a high level of expertise to cover all different aspects of their entire infrastructure.

AWS Well-Architected Review for Continuous Success in the Cloud

Ecospend’s data and payment Gateway had already been running successfully on their AWS environment. Their need was not a specific problem or issue solution, instead they needed expert guidance for an end-to-end infrastructure improvement plan. They teamed up with Sufle to perform a cloud architecture review and improvement project to leverage the full benefits of AWS Cloud and services.

As an official Well-Architected Partner of AWS Partner Network, the Sufle team suggested that Ecospend assess their infrastructure with the Well-Architected Review and continue with report and remediation steps. Since the framework provides a comprehensive approach with its 5 Pillars around Operational Excellence, Reliability, Security, Performance Efficiency and Cost Optimization, the Well-Architected Review was a perfect solution to evaluate their existing AWS environment, workloads and application platform thoroughly and improve them with proven best practices.

The Sufle & Ecospend Well-Architected Review was conducted as a conversation around their infrastructure, guided by the Well-Architected Framework. With both the expertise and experience of AWS that is presented with the Well-Architected Framework itself and Sufle’s direct experience across various business verticals and AWS environments, Sufle helped the Ecospend team to gain an overall understanding of their infrastructure and areas in need of improvement.

Following the Well-Architected Review, Sufle provided a detailed report around the 5 Pillars of a Well-Architected infrastructure and specific service implementation recommendations. Both the review and reporting steps were performed in collaboration with Sufle’s experts and Ecospend teams through 1:1 approach to ensure all the stakeholders were involved in this process and their unique business requirements were addressed. Based on the findings, Sufle successfully implemented various resolutions to help the Ecospend team achieve a more secure, reliable, highly available and efficient infrastructure.

In the remediation process, security services such as AWS GuardDuty and AWS Config were implemented to achieve intelligent threat detection capabilities and continuous compliance through automated account, workload, and sensitive data monitoring. Sufle also recommended and implemented AWS Organizations to enable the Ecospend team to manage their multiple accounts and workloads centrally and maintain operational excellence as their business scales and evolves. These services improved their ability to control, monitor and secure their sensitive environments and achieve continuous success in their infrastructure.

A Well-Architected Foundation for Greater Business Value

The Well-Architected Review helped Ecospend to leverage the full advantages and capabilities of the AWS Cloud with a reliable architecture upon a solid foundation. Ensuring high availability and associated business continuity through continuous monitoring, autoscaling, testing and health mechanisms, Ecospend ensures both ongoing and future performance to serve its customers in the best manner.

While Operational Excellence, Reliability, Security and Performance Efficiency pillars helped Ecospend increase their visibility around their entire infrastructure including resources, services and separate workloads, the cost optimization pillar also helped them to improve their cloud financial management. They are now able to achieve economies of scale as they grow by increased awareness of their cloud spending patterns and informed decisions.

In addition to the strategic benefits of a Well-Architected infrastructure and focus on the pillars, Ecospend achieved $5000 of AWS funding with the Well-Architected Review after remediating more than 25% of their High-Severity Issues that came upon the initial assessment. They became eligible for the funding benefit for their future infrastructure projects by working on their infrastructure and implementing best practices with an official Well-Architected Partner. We plan to continue performing Well-Architected Reviews in the future as well to address evolving needs and ensure success in the cloud as they operate.

Interested in aligning your cloud infrastructure with your business goals? Book a Well-Architected Review Now to start improving your cloud architecture with expert guidance.