Hello and welcome to this episode of 'This is My Architecture'.
My name is Kapil and with me today I have Sapna from AxiomSL.
Sapna, welcome to the show.
Hey, nice to be here.
Glad to have you here, Sapna Can you introduce us to AxiomSL?
Sure.
So AxiomSL's controller view is essentially a risk and reporting platform.
We allow financial institutions to load native data, enrich, aggregate it,
map it to regulate the templates,
all through a no-code transparent experience.
That's fantastic.
And obviously AxiomSL has been around for several years,
can you tell us what was the motivation to build
a SaaS platform on AWS?
It was the industry's change of view on cloud, really.
So the industry went from unacceptable on cloud
to a matured stance of this is a key business enabler.
And regulators globally identified this,
assessed cloud risk and provided guidelines.
So what financial institutions realized was
they can work around data sovereignty and security concerns
so long as they have the right in-house team or vendor.
AxiomSL already having a strong footprint in the regulatory reporting industry,
thought we were best placed to capture cloud benefits
and bring this to our clients.
Got it.
And so can you tell us what do you actually deploy on AWS
on behalf of your customers?
Sure.
So we essentially do an automated deployment
of a single tenant isolated application stack,
as you see here.
And this exists per environment per client.
Wow.
So that must be hundreds of different environments
that you have to provision and orchestrate,
how do you do that efficiently?
So automation is key to it.
We try end-to-end industry standard automation,
so we achieve this using Terraform for IaC,
Jenkins for continuous integration,
Ansible for configuration, of course, and Amazon's ECS,
and then for the CIS Hardened Images are built through AMI,
again for every environment and every client.
Got it.
So every update to the application,
you package it up as a CIS Hardened Image and deploy into the client environments.
Obviously security must be top of mind for AxiomSL.
What other security features do you have in your platform?
So security is the center of everything we do
in our application stack to our processes.
We achieve this using native AWS services,
so namely KMS, Security Hub, and GuardDuty
give us the standard of security we are looking for
and then we automate security response to incidents
using AWS, Config CloudWatch, CloudTrail.
Not to forget S3 is used quite heavily as well
to provide end-to-end data encryption
both for transit as well as at rest.
That's fantastic.
And I see there's another AWS native service that you're using,
Amazon Redshift, can you tell us a bit about that?
So Redshift came as really a problem-solver for us,
because we were looking at the statement
of extremely large volumes of client data
in the last few years
because of increase in granular regulatory requirements
and we were looking for technologies
which could process this data quickly,
come at a reasonable price, little expertise needed from us,
proven track record of continuous service availability,
and all of this was checked by Redshift,
especially if you consider the recently available smaller RA3 nodes,
because they allow us to scale independently for storage versus compute.
Absolutely.
And speaking of scaling storage,
do you also happen to use Redshift Spectrum?
Yeah, we are actually very excited about it.
So Redshift Spectrum essentially allows us
to give our clients a warm storage capability,
what we mean by that
is regulators often ask clients for MIS on historical data,
and this is on short notice more often than not,
which means that financial institutions need to do all of this
with quick turn around time,
so they don't have to wait for data unarchive,
and load and then for the processing,
and Redshift Spectrum helps us do that.
Got it.
So with Redshift you are able to deliver better performance,
better cost-efficiency for your customers.
Tell us what was the experience like
for the application to integrate with Redshift.
Right.
So our application is database agnostic to begin with.
So it was relatively easier to kick off Redshift incorporation
into our ecosystem,
having said that though, there were changes to be made.
For example, we have to separate
OLTP data workload processing from OLAP.
Right.
We also need to obviously support Spectrum
and then work around Redshift's inherent table limit design.
Right.
But you were able to overcome those challenges
and deliver relatively much better performance
and cost efficiency.
Tell us what's next for AxiomSL RegCloud.
Right.
So AxiomSL are all in for into RegCloud,
especially because forms of all types really need to embrace cloud now.
So in addition to the usual optimizations
that one would expect in terms of performance, cost,
scalability on any application,
we are very excited with the results that we see on AI/ML distributed processing,
higher computation,
and we are looking forward
to bringing these additional value adds to our clients.
All really exciting stuff, Sapna.
Thank you so much for sharing these insights with our customers and viewers.
And thank you for watching this episode of 'This is My Architecture'.