Lionheart chose managed security services to protect a mission-critical lottery application
About Lionheart/S.O. Asher
Lionheart Systems Inc is part of S.O. Asher Consultants Ltd. S.O. Asher Consultants pioneered the charitable gaming sector and has been a market leader in the industry since the company’s establishment in 1978. It is a professional services firm that focuses solely on the development and management of charitable lotteries for established, influential charities.
Challenge: Automated Secure Deployment of Scalable Lotteries
Wanting to move from a legacy, on-premise environment to a secure cloud, Lionheart issued an RFP for a fully redundant solution without a single point of failure. The solution needed to enable the automated deployment of highly secure new lotteries for Lionheart clients, as well as scale to handle large spikes in traffic when the lotteries were launched and advertised on local media.
Solution: Managed Security on a Scalable Cloud
FuseForward moved Lionheart’s mission-critical lottery application to a highly available secure AWS environment that automatically scales up and down based on the volume of customer traffic. Creating two separate secure environments for each lottery, including UAT and Production, FuseForward load balanced the two application instances across multiple availability zones (AZs) or data centers. These were set up for auto-scaling where additional instances would be added or removed, based on CPU percentages.
The database instances were set up across multiple AZs to ensure no single points of failure. In addition, FuseForward set up a disaster recovery site in another AWS region to ensure the highest amount of uptime could be achieved. Security was built in at every step of the deployment.
As a result of the fact that Lionheart did not have enough time to perform load testing prior to the lottery launch, FuseForward opted to take a more cautious approach, deploying servers with higher than required specifications. These instances will be adjusted based on the size of each lottery. AWS services used in the solution include VPC, EC2, application load balancers, auto-scaling, RDS, cloud watch, cloud trail, certificate manager, S3, route 53, EFS, key management service, and EBS.
Results: High Availability & Top-Rated Security
The first lottery application was deployed at the end of June 2022 and has achieved no unscheduled downtime since deployment. FuseForward was then able to automate the deployment so new lotteries could be deployed within hours. Separate AWS account numbers were deployed for each lottery to ensure Lionheart received separate billing for each of their customers.
FuseForward employed an independent third party to conduct penetration testing and load testing, and the solution passed with the highest ratings in both cases. The solution improved business continuity, security, and website performance for Lionheart, and FuseForward is providing ongoing managed security services to ensure the continued security of the application. Any future lottery applications will also be monitored and protected by FuseForward’s skilled and certified security specialists.
About FuseForward
FuseForward accelerates digital transformation for critical infrastructure providers such as cities, utilities, and transportation providers through consulting and technology expertise. With expertise across cloud, intelligent systems, advanced analytics, cybersecurity, and much more, FuseForward serves customers around the world from offices in Canada, Europe, and South Africa.