AWS Cape Town Region Launch
As an AWS Advanced partner in South Africa, Silicon Overdrive is proud to support the launch of the AWS Cape Town Region. We invite you to join us in the celebration of the launch of South Africa’s first AWS Region by taking advantage of our Region Launch special offers. Let Silicon Overdrive help you adopt the cloud and guide you to transform your digital business.
Special Offers
2-Days Free Consultancy
Get two days consulting free for qualified accounts to migrate to the AWS Cape Town Region. This includes migrating from other regions to Cape Town, as well as migrating from on-premise or other environments to the AWS Cloud.
Includes Linux, Windows, and all Open Source solutions.
Security
Assessment
If you are planning to migrate to the AWS Cape Town region and would like to have a security assessment of your environment post-migration or on your existing accounts, we offer 50% discount on regular security assessment costs.
Cost Optimisation Assessment
Get a detailed report on your AWS account costs and on ways how you can reduce it. As a one-time offer, you pay 50% of the money that you save in your two months if acting on our recommendations.
Our recommendations might include insights into right-sizing your resources, removing idle or not used resources, and more.
AWS Case Studies
The Challenge
Electrum Payments provides enterprise software that represents the next generation of payments technology. Major retailers and financial institutions use Electrum’s technology to accept payments, process financial transactions, and provide value added services. To become this force in their industry, Electrum needed infrastructure that could scale to meet the demands of their increasing client base and that would allow them to create a gateway switch for Electrum’s enterprise clients to engage with their clients, while maintaining strict security compliance.
The Solution
Silicon Overdrive met with Electrum’s decision makers to discuss how we could assist them with reaching their goals. With a very tight deadline, Silicon Overdrive architected a solution, which included deploying services such as EC2 instances for computing power, RDS for relational databases and CloudFront for delivering content.
The Outcome
Following the deployment of their infrastructure in AWS, with the guidance and assistance of Silicon Overdrive’s AWS team, Electrum deployed an enhanced USSD for banks and have since successfully converted their environment from Infrastructure as a Service to Software as a Service, thereby increasing their turnover and profitability. They now process billions of transactions, in milliseconds, per annum and provide their customers with 99.999% uptime.
Silicon Overdrive also assisted with the implementation of Value Added Service (VAS) systems for Electrum’s large retail clients (airtime, entertainment and travel tickets from their stores). Silicon Overdrive continues to provide technical assistance in building out their environments and monitoring, securing and maintaining these environments.
The Challenge
Founded in 1996, PayGate wanted to become a force in the payment gateway industry, both in Africa as well as internationally. To reach this goal, PayGate needed to scale their infrastructure to accommodate the traffic that would come with taking on more customers but where found that there were no data centres capable of providing them with the correct security and compliance needed to growth their business. PayGate needed a solution which would allow them to increase their client base, maintain high security, and become PCI compliant, while at the same time be a cost-effective option.
The Solution
Silicon Overdrive’s AWS certified engineers met with PayGate to map out a solution which would cover all of their requirements. Silicon Overdrive proposed that PayGate’s environments should be rebuilt on AWS and implement segregation, allowing them to deploy servers securely for each role. Moving PayGate’s infrastructure to AWS would ensure that their environment would adhere to best practice security and compliance standards and, as PayGate would only pay for what they use with AWS, Silicon Overdrive was able to present a solution which would also be cost effective.
The Outcome
With the assistance and guidance of Silicon Overdrive, PayGate has ensured that they continue to be PCI Compliant six years later and Silicon Overdrive has architected over 60 server instances and set up numerous applications, allowing PayGate to process more transactions per minute, increasing their overall turnover considerably. PayGate remains one of Silicon Overdrive’s valued Clients, signing on for one of our tailored support and maintenance agreements, ensuring that their infrastructure is maintained on a continuous basis. PayGate is now one of the leading payment platforms in Africa and counts some of the continents’ largest and most well-respected companies as their Clients, as well as some internationally recognised organisations.
The Challenge
University of Pretoria is one of the top research institutions in Africa and its mission is to be a leading research-intensive university in Africa. It has been recognised internationally for its quality, relevance and impact, as well as for developing people, creating knowledge and making a difference locally and globally
The Solution
The University of Pretoria approached Silicon Overdrive to improve the security and performance of its website. Silicon Overdrive’s AWS certified engineers ran an assessment of the current environment against the AWS Well-Architected Framework and security best practices. The outcome was to architect and build out an entirely new environment using AWS services such as Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, Amazon Route 53, Amazon CloudWatch, AWS Identity and Access Management and Amazon EFS to meet University of Pretoria’s needs to ensure high availability, security and compliance.
The Outcome
Silicon Overdrive architected and built out the University of Pretoria’s infrastructure according to AWS and security best practices to meet the University’s requirements for a cost optimised, high availability, secure and compliant hosting environment. The AWS team worked with the University’s management and software development team to successfully migrate to this new environment. Silicon Overdrive continues to support and maintain the University of Pretoria’s new environment under a Managed Service Level Agreement.
The Challenge
SwitchPay is a dynamic and innovative solutions provider in financial technology, switching and acquisition solutions. With over 20 year’s technology and finance experience, SwitchPay has grown into a key solutions provider across multiple industries. As the company grows, they need to ensure that they are scalable, while still meeting compliance requirements. Additionally, SwitchPay was experiencing a few errors with their Windows Server 2016 infrastructure, which they asked Silicon Overdrive to audit and bring up to industry best practices.
The Solution
Silicon Overdrive architected and migrated the SwitchPay Windows-based payment processing infrastructure to AWS to ensure high-availability and meet security and compliance requirements.
Some of the AWS Services used include, AWS Directory Service, Amazon RDS for SQL Server, Amazon EBS.
These Microsoft technologies were leveraged in the solution: IIS, MSSQL, Active Directory, RDP Gateway
The Outcome
Following the deployment of their infrastructure on AWS, with the guidance and assistance of Silicon Overdrive’s AWS team, SwitchPay was able to migrate their applications to AWS and meet security and PCI DSS compliance requirements. Silicon Overdrive continues to provide technical assistance in building out their environments and monitoring, securing and maintaining these environments.
The Challenge
Sorbet is a national chain of beauty salons that offers nail, hair and skin care solutions for men and women. In order to grow, Sorbet relies on a specific set of Business Intelligence (BI) tools. But, Sorbet’s BI tools were unable to run against their Microsoft SQL Server RDS instance. They required a reliable solution to ensure that they could use their tools.
The Solution
Silicon Overdrive set up ongoing replication between the Microsoft SQL Server RDS instance with an EC2 hosted Microsoft SQL Server instance using the AWS Database Migration Service, thus ensuring their BI tools perform optimally. Some of the AWS services used include Amazon RDS for SQL Server, Amazon EBS
These Microsoft technologies were leveraged in the solution: IIS, MSSQL, RDP Gateway
The Outcome
The ongoing replication of the Microsoft SQL Server RDS enabled Sorbet to meet operational requirements, and ensured that their infrastructure is highly available.