Background
Soter Technologies have a proven record of developing and delivering innovative solutions for environmental and social intelligence to identify and avert threats, save lives, and impact more than 1000 organizations globally. As the WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic, and the virus’s likelihood of infecting escalated in crowded places, governments started imposing lockdown globally. A complete shutdown couldn’t have been a long-term solution since it affected businesses, economies, and people. Soter developed a solution called – Symptomsense™ Evaluation Gateway – a non-evasive walk-through electronic full-body scanner. It detects symptoms of COVID-19 in 8 seconds to help check the virus’s spread and reopen the economy. Soter engaged Digital Alpha to create a secure backend for the device in the cloud using Amazon Web Services.
Customer Challenges
Soter Technologies has delivered some of the most comprehensive and safe solutions using cutting-edge technology to improve people’s lives.
With the ongoing global crisis, Soter recognized that the device would be needed in offices, government buildings, public places, etc. But the company soon realized it had several issues to address – scalability, speed, volume, and spinning up the infrastructure in different regions complying with local regulatory guidelines. Soter had to opt for a solution that would enable remote device monitoring, software updates, customer-specific authentication, authorization, customization, and configuration.
Solution
Soter required a solution that ensures the speed of operation, scalability, and the ability to modernize and quickly respond to customer needs and behavior. Soter leveraged Digital Alpha’s partnership with Amazon Web Services to build the backend infrastructure. AWS IAM gives policy control to secure data and privacy at client, country, and regional levels as per regulatory guidelines such as GIST and HIPPA in the US.
AWS ElasticBeanstalk, DynamoDB, Application Load Balancer, and Route53 allowed the backend to scale out and scale in quickly depending on the workloads. Symptomsense backend infrastructure supports a large volume of devices and can handle health data for diverse sets of clients, countries, and regions with minor configurational and policy changes. Symptomsense™ supports client audit, data residency, and versioning requirements. It automatically segregates the workload to ensure seamless functioning.
Customer Benefits
By using AWS, Soter could easily overcome the challenges and forge ahead. The elastic nature of the cloud enables device rollout to scale quickly at optimal cost. The regulatory requirements are easy to support at the country and regional level; the configuration consistency reduces errors.
Cloud infrastructure as code with Terraform efficiently provisions, changes, and versions required backend AWS services. Infrastructure as a Code (IaC) accelerates cloud adoption and manages the IT infrastructure using source code. With a mammoth of data to deal with, IaC simplifies large-scale configuration and management. IaC using Terraform and AWS CodePipeline makes the standing up of backend infrastructure possible in minutes. Symptomsense captures and transfers the personal health information of individuals. Hence, it is imperative to underscore the deepening importance of data privacy and security. It uses SSL and TLS protocols to encrypt real-time data. The data residency option lets authorities determine if they need to store the data per jurisdiction guidelines. Access to the data collected can be securely governed at various levels using the Identity and Access Management (IAM) control. The IAM restricts access to the data, and only authorized entities can regulate it.