Scaling Business Operations with a Secure AWS Cloud Platform and Advanced Identity Management
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Executive Summary
The customer needed a secure, scalable, and highly available cloud environment to manage identity, permissions, and operations at enterprise scale. This case study outlines how Crest Data designed and deployed a multi-region AWS cloud operations platform built for resilience and advanced identity governance spanning multiple Regions and Availability Zones, protected by AWS WAF and Shield, powered by Route 53 for reliable DNS, and optimized with an Application Load Balancer (ALB) to efficiently distribute traffic across application tiers.
With its AWS-native architecture, the Security platform enables organizations to manage permissions at scale, enforce least-privilege access, and maintain continuous compliance while ensuring a secure, highly available cloud environment.
About the Customer
The customer is a leading multi-cloud permissions management provider recognized for its innovative identity and access governance capabilities. Their platform protects critical cloud infrastructure by offering deep visibility into permissions, continuously monitoring activity, and automatically remediating over-permissioned human and machine identities.
Customer Challenge
The customer required a secure AWS platform with stronger identity and permissions management to reduce risks from over-privileged accounts and maintain compliance at scale. Traditional IAM controls lacked visibility and automation, creating gaps in governance and security. The challenge was to design a resilient multi-AZ architecture that integrated the products Security for least-privilege enforcement and activity monitoring, while leveraging AWS-native services such as WAF, Shield, GuardDuty, KMS, and Config for protection and compliance. In addition, the platform needed unified observability through CloudWatch, Athena, Prometheus, Grafana, and ELK to ensure operational visibility and faster remediation.
Proposed Solution
Crest Data helped the customer deploy AWS and integrate Amazon CloudWatch as an Observability platform, infused with DevSecOps best practices.
Core services leverage Amazon RDS (PostgreSQL and MySQL, both Multi-AZ) for relational workloads, Amazon ElastiCache (Redis) for low-latency caching, and Amazon S3 as the foundation of a durable data lake. Encrypted EBS volumes and AWS KMS secure data at rest, while Amazon GuardDuty provides continuous threat detection. AWS Config enforces compliance by evaluating resource configurations against best practices.
For observability, the platform integrates Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon SNS, and Amazon Athena, complemented by Prometheus and Grafana for metrics visualization and the ELK stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana) for centralized log analysis. Together, these services deliver unified dashboards, deep operational visibility, and faster incident resolution.
Environment Setup
Each customer stack resides in its own AWS account with the same set of Infrastructure.
Implemented environment isolation with dedicated VPCs, subnets, and IAM roles per stack to enhance security and minimize cross-environment impact.
Networking
Designed secure VPC architectures with public/private subnets, NAT gateways, and route tables to isolate workloads and control traffic flow.
Implemented multi-AZ Application Load Balancers and Route 53 DNS failover for high availability and seamless traffic distribution.
Enforced network security with Security Groups, NACLs, and VPC Flow Logs, ensuring fine-grained access control and continuous monitoring.
Database Layer
Deployed Amazon RDS for MySQL and PostgreSQL in Multi-AZ configuration, ensuring automated failover with minimal downtime during AZ failures.
Enabled automated backups, snapshots, and cross-AZ replication to strengthen durability and meet strict RPO/RTO requirements.
Configured read replicas across AZs for workload scaling, while cross-region replication provided disaster recovery and business continuity.
Security & Access Control
Implemented fine-grained IAM policies and role-based access controls, ensuring least-privilege access across AWS resources.
Centralized identity management with AWS SSO and MFA enforcement, strengthening authentication and reducing unauthorized access risks.
Secured sensitive credentials with AWS Secrets Manager and automated key rotation via KMS, eliminating hardcoded secrets in codebases.
Automation & Observability
Infrastructure Automation
Provisioned cloud infrastructure using Terraform and AWS CloudFormation, enabling consistent, repeatable, and version-controlled deployments.
Automated patching, scaling, and configuration management with AWS Systems Manager and Ansible, reducing manual overhead and errors.
Integrated IaC workflows into CI/CD pipelines, accelerating environment provisioning and reducing lead time for changes by 60%.
Monitoring & Logging
Centralized Monitoring & Alerting – Integrated CloudWatch with Prometheus and Grafana dashboards to proactively detect anomalies, enabling faster incident response.
Security & Compliance Visibility – Leveraged ELK stack to collect and analyze audit logs, improving traceability and compliance with security standards.
End-to-End Observability – Implemented OpenTelemetry for distributed tracing across microservices, enhancing root cause analysis and reducing MTTR.
Centralized Observability
A central Grafana server in a dedicated Tools AWS account, which is connected with all environments.
Provides unified dashboards aggregating metrics from all stacks.
DevSecOps Best Practices
Shift Security Left – Integrated automated code, dependency, and container image scanning into CI/CD pipelines to detect vulnerabilities early.
Secure Secrets & Access – Enforced least-privilege IAM policies and managed secrets with AWS Secrets Manager to eliminate hardcoded credentials.
Continuous Monitoring & Compliance – Implemented centralized logging and alerting with CloudWatch, ELK, and OTel to ensure real-time threat detection and audit readiness.
Why AWS?
Global Reach & Reliability – AWS offers the largest global infrastructure with multiple regions and availability zones, ensuring high availability and disaster recovery options.
Breadth of Services – 200+ fully managed services (compute, storage, databases, AI/ML, security, DevOps) reduce operational overhead and speed up innovation.
Scalability & Elasticity – Auto Scaling and on-demand resources allow seamless handling of unpredictable workloads without overprovisioning.
Security & Compliance – End-to-end encryption, fine-grained IAM, and compliance with global standards (ISO, SOC, HIPAA, GDPR) provide enterprise-grade security.
Cost Optimization – Pay-as-you-go pricing, Reserved Instances, and Savings Plans lower TCO while enabling flexible budgeting.
DevOps & Automation – Strong native integrations with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform/CloudFormation), CI/CD, and monitoring tools accelerate deployments.
Innovation & Ecosystem – Continuous service innovation and a vast partner ecosystem provide future-ready solutions.
Outcomes & Success Metrics
High Availability:
Deployed EC2 instances across multiple Availability Zones with Auto Scaling groups, ensuring resilience against AZ-level failures.
Implemented Application Load Balancer (ALB) to distribute traffic across VM instances, enabling fault tolerance and zero-downtime upgrades.
Leveraged Amazon Route 53 with health checks and DNS failover to provide seamless redirection during regional outages.
Configured Amazon EBS with Multi-Attach and regular snapshots, ensuring data durability and rapid recovery.
Automated instance replacement and recovery using EC2 Auto Recovery, reducing MTTR during failures.
Established cross-region disaster recovery with AMI replication and warm standby architecture, meeting RTO and RPO requirements.
Security:
Enforced least-privilege access using AWS IAM policies and role-based access controls, reducing security risks.
Implemented AWS KMS for encryption of data at rest and TLS for in-transit security, ensuring compliance with industry standards.
Integrated AWS Secrets Manager to securely rotate and manage credentials, removing hardcoded secrets.
Enabled AWS GuardDuty and Security Hub for continuous threat detection and centralized compliance monitoring.
Applied automated patching on EC2 and EKS workloads via Systems Manager, minimizing vulnerabilities.
Deployed WAF to protect applications from DDoS and web exploits, ensuring high availability.
Operational Efficiency:
Full security stack provisioning time reduced from 3 working weeks manually → <1 working week via Terraform + Jenkins (65% faster).
Implemented automated monitoring and recovery workflows on AWS, reducing manual intervention and cutting operational time by 35%.
Optimized deployment pipelines using Terraform and CI/CD using Jenkins, accelerating release cycles and reducing operational overhead by 40%.
Observability:
100% of metrics and logs captured via Prometheus + ELK, aggregated in Grafana global dashboards.
Automated scaling and patching reduced unplanned downtime incidents by ~35% YoY.
About Crest Data
Crest Data is a data and AI-first product engineering and technology solutions provider specializing in Agentic/GenAI, Cybersecurity, Observability, Data Analytics, Workflow Automation, and Cloud. With 1,200+ experts and a track record of 5,500+ successful projects across 150+ global customers, we help organizations build intelligent, secure, and scalable systems.
Backed by strong partnerships with AWS, Google, Microsoft, Datadog, Dynatrace, ServiceNow, NetApp, and others, Crest Data delivers AI-driven engineering, accelerated migrations, and outcome-focused solutions that power digital transformation worldwide.