SAFRA National Service Association
About SAFRA
SAFRA National Service Association is an organisation that was formed as a social and recreational club for National Servicemen from the Singapore Armed Forces. It was originally formed in 1972 as the “Singapore Armed Forces Reservist Association. They are the go-to destination for all social, recreational, sports and educational facilities for NSmen and their families. SAFRA’s goal was to aid the Singapore Armed Forces (SAF) enhance camaraderie and boost morale among National Servicemen.
Since then, SAFRA has built a network of clubs located at Jurong, Mount Faber, Punggol, Tampines, Toa Payoh, and Yishun. In addition to clubs, they offer a host of activities, value-added services and membership perks that meet the lifestyle needs of their community of more than 350,000 SAFRA members.
The Challenge
SAFRA wanted to build a reliable, secure and scalable infrastructure to provide e-Services for its members. The organisation wanted a platform to scale the services to fit their needs, customize applications and access cloud services from anywhere with an internet connection. SAFRA was looking for a partner with a managed service platform, which has to be more reliable and consistent than in-house IT infrastructure. They were specific that the solution provider should offer a Service Level Agreement to guarantee 24/7/365 and 99.999% availability.
With the Scalable and reliable infrastructure, they wanted their applications, designs and process to be secured in a way that it is not encrypted at any level. Solutions offered by a reliable cloud computing service should provide a solid foundation for preventive and protective measures, crucial to the financial and morale health of their business.
Why Amazon Web Services?
They believe that AWS lets enterprise users get applications to market quickly, without worrying about underlying infrastructure cost or maintenance. The business feels that Amazon Web Services is a way ahead of any other cloud computing services as it gives enterprises a competitive advantage by providing the most innovative technology available in the market. It allows users to choose public, private or hybrid storage offerings, depending on security needs and other considerations. SAFRA is convinced with one of the AWS advantages of utility pay structure where you pay only for the resources you use.
SAFRA adopted some of AWS Technologies to achieve a reliable, scalable and secure infrastructure. To provide complete control of computing services Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) has been used. Amazon EC2 enables the process to increase or decrease within minutes, not hours or days. Elastic Block Storage is a block storage device to offer consistent and low-latency performance needed to run business workloads. To store and protect any amount of data for a range of use cases such as websites, mobile applications, backup and restore, archive, enterprise applications, IoT devices and big data analytics using Amazon Simple Storage Service( Amazon S3). It is designed for high durability and stores data for millions of applications. Amazon Route 53 is designed to give developers and businesses an extremely reliable and cost-effective way to route end users to Internet applications. Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) makes the organisation process easy to set up, operate and scale a relational database in the cloud. Fault tolerance for all the applications is achieved using Elastic Load Balancing by ensuring scalability, performance and security.
Benefits
In the process of migration to Cloud, SAFRA was able to scale all the applications in the cloud. The performance of the organisation was increased by helping them tune and monitor the database load to determine when and where to take action with an easy-to-understand dashboard. One of the main advantages of migrating to cloud with AWS was to free up their time by not maintaining any data centers.
Cloud computing security was built upon the inherent, basic benefits of increased security, making it safer for employees, clients and businesses to operate and collaborate across multiple locations and devices. As a right partner, Cloud Comrade also manages services to make sure everything is in place and provides 24/7 support. Comrades were with SAFRA throughout the journey to achieve cloud migration in the most effective and efficient way.
