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Varosha Tech’s migration from local cloud to AWS for One Cloud Storage Solution

Varosa Technology is a Nepal-based software company specializing in delivering high-quality and cost-effective software solutions to clients within and outside the country. As an authorized reseller of Zoom, Varosa Technology serves numerous customers across Nepal. Recognizing the growing demand among its clients for a unified platform to store recorded meetings, Varosa proposed leveraging “Zoom Cloud.”

However, they encountered challenges with the cost-effectiveness of Zoom Cloud and the absence of a pay-as-you-go pricing model. In response, Varosa Technology’s team devised a solution – the One Cloud Storage Solution (OCSS). This innovative application was designed to meet their clients’ storage requirements in a more cost-efficient manner. To achieve this, OCSS was hosted on a local cloud service provider’s infrastructure, providing an effective and economical alternative to Zoom Cloud.

Problem Statement

The deployment of the application on a local cloud service provider led to the client encountering the following issues. Varosa had a dedicated system administrator who was responsible for resource provisioning leading to cost overhead for Varosa’s team. Due to the unreliability of the local cloud provider, the business operations were disrupted on several occasions by power or network failures, leading to dissatisfied end users. Along with this, the client faced instances of unauthorized access to the application data making the application vulnerable to internal and external threats. The lack of automated deployment led the development team to spend more time deploying rather than developing the application features due to which the promised features couldn’t be delivered on time leading to customer dissatisfaction. The client had to predict the monthly resource usage beforehand which led to sometimes over-provisioning sometimes under-provisioning of the resources leading to cost overhead on several occasions. One time the application was down for more than 10 hours which resulted in questioning Varosa’s credibility and ruining their name.

Compounding these challenges, the absence of a robust disaster recovery plan left the application highly vulnerable to data loss and extended downtime during outages. Without cross-region replication or automated recovery processes, any failure could lead to service disruptions, significant data loss, and further weakening of client trust and business continuity.

 

Security Challenges

Security vulnerabilities in the local cloud deployment posed a major challenge, exposing the application to potential cyber threats and unauthorized access. Weak access controls, improper network configurations, and a lack of security measures left the system susceptible to attacks, data breaches, and compliance risks. Without proper threat detection and authentication mechanisms, the application faced increased exposure to malicious activities, jeopardizing customer data and overall system integrity. These security gaps highlighted the urgent need for a more robust, well-structured security framework to ensure data protection and regulatory compliance.

Solution

Genese Solution helped Varosa’s team to solve their problems and adopt DevOps culture, which improved collaboration among team members.

 

Genese proposed to the client a highly available and scalable solution to address the problem that clients were facing. Genese shifted the resources from the local cloud server to AWS for hassle-free development and deployment with the implementation of the CICD pipeline. For efficient, secure, and scalable cloud operations of Varosa, we implemented a multi-account structure through the AWS Control Tower based on distinct environments for various projects. We used the account structure to streamline governance and compliance efforts by enforcing policies consistently across organizational units while offering flexibility to tailor configurations as per Varosa’s requirements. This approach also enabled segregation and isolation of the environment. We implemented preventive controls to prevent potential threats as well as detective controls for identifying and responding to security incidents and policy violations promptly. We implemented Infrastructure as Code using Terraform to provision infrastructure in a consistent manner, to ensure that our deployments are automated, repeatable, and scalable. This approach has greatly improved Varosa’s operational efficiency, reduced human error, and enabled us to easily manage and version our infrastructure configurations. We migrated the application from a monolithic architecture to microservices architecture which provided better scalability, flexibility resiliency, and increased productivity. By incorporating auto-scaling and load-balancing features, we enabled the system to adjust resources based on traffic demands dynamically. This incorporation ensured high availability and undegraded performance despite high traffic demand. We implemented AWS WAF and finely tuned rules and filtering capabilities to mitigate the problem of unauthorized access and data breaches from malicious requests, and potential attackers. We enabled detailed performance insights across all services that allowed for real-time monitoring and prompt issue identification by implementing monitoring and logging tools. We set up alarms and notifications such that whenever anomalies were detected notifications were sent to the respective team members and the team members were able to take swift action. 

Recognizing the critical need for a robust disaster recovery plan, Genese implemented a comprehensive backup and restore strategy specifically for Varosa’s One Cloud Storage Solution (OCSS). This strategy leveraged AWS Backup to create and manage backups for critical resources such as EC2 instances, RDS databases, and S3 buckets in the Mumbai region, with backups stored in North Virginia. Strict Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) were defined, aiming to minimize downtime and data loss during incidents. Regular simulated recovery drills were conducted to test and refine these objectives, ensuring that critical data had more frequent and comprehensive backups.

Security Remediation and Enhancement

To remediate security vulnerabilities, Genese solution implemented a series of security enhancements. A secure CI/CD pipeline was introduced to ensure that all code changes were validated and scanned before deployment, reducing the risk of vulnerabilities in the production environment. AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF) was implemented with finely tuned rules and filtering capabilities to safeguard against malicious requests and potential attackers. AWS GuardDuty was integrated to monitor malicious activities and provide real-time threat detection. Additionally, network security configurations were reinforced by restricting unnecessary open ports and ensuring private access to resources within VPCs. Role-based access control (RBAC) with strict permissions was enforced using AWS IAM policies to enhance security and limit access to authorized personnel only.

To further strengthen authentication and identity management, AWS Single Sign-On (SSO) and SCIM were implemented to enable centralized user access control and enforce multi-factor authentication (MFA). Continuous security assessments were conducted using AWS Inspector to identify and remediate vulnerabilities in the infrastructure. The findings from these scans were consolidated in AWS Security Hub, where a comprehensive security score was monitored. With these security improvements, Varosa achieved a security compliance score above 90%, ensuring a robust and secure cloud environment.

Results

Varosa’s strategic investment in the OCSS DevOps team, coupled with the implementation of a robust disaster recovery (DR) strategy, has been very successful. The company has managed to reduce operational costs by 25%, allowing for increased investment in product development. This reduction in costs has enabled Varosa to bring new features and products to market more quickly, making the company more agile in responding to customer demands.

In addition to cost savings, Varosa has seen a remarkable improvement in the reliability and availability of its applications. Downtime has been reduced by 99%, with the OCSS platform now able to scale seamlessly to meet increased demand, resulting in a better customer experience and bolstering Varosa’s reputation for reliability.

With the implementation of comprehensive security measures, Varosa has successfully mitigated security risks. Security vulnerabilities have been significantly reduced, and the Security Hub score has consistently remained above 90%. Regular security scans, continuous monitoring, and real-time alerts have provided an added layer of security, ensuring the protection of sensitive customer data. The adoption of secure access management mechanisms has also strengthened identity verification processes, reducing unauthorized access and potential security breaches.

Overall, Varosa’s investment in DevOps, security, and resilience practices has proven to be a great success. The company has improved its operational efficiency, reduced costs, enhanced its disaster resilience, and provided a better customer experience while ensuring a highly secure infrastructure. These achievements have strengthened Varosa’s market position and made the company more competitive.