Whilst having a very specialised team, Comsec did not have the inhouse capabilities to run with turnkey solutions specifically within AWS. They were in need of a specialist team with an AWS centric skillset.

Some of their client base consist of worldwide retail brands, all of which experience vast sums of fraudulent purchases that cost the companies millions in lost revenue each year. Comsec were tasked with the prevention of these losses, so a move to AWS that could provide tools and features to help in targeting these fraudsters was a necessity.

Comsec needed an experienced cloud partner that had the knowledge and team in place to help with overall cloud adoption, understanding of turnkey services and capabilities for machine learning integration in the future. As a specialist of all of the above, Firemind were in the perfect position to ensure Comsec could undergo the changes they required, whilst also facilitating a deep learning process with documentation for the Comsec team.

As an initial setup, this project took on the shape of forming the core infrastructure and skeleton to which AWS services could be deployed and developed. The infrastructure brought with it AWS Lambda serverless compute services, AWS Step Functions, AWS key Management Service (KMS) and Amazon S3 buckets (to name a few).

The infrastructure and backend were made deployable via CICD (i.e GitHub Actions) and all processes were heavily documented to assist with ongoing learning for the Comsec team. This skeleton will quickly become fleshed out with the integration of machine learning services (Amazon Translate, Amazon Augmented AI (A2I) and Amazon Comprehend, to be precise). As well as helping to power vital data insights through visual database services like Amazon Neptune.

As equally important to the setup and launch of the new AWS infrastructure was the training and documentation involved in the handover. The firemind team were able to document many new services to the Comsec team, including the wide range of machine learning tools and services which helped illustrate the integration of ML at scale.

These documents will ensure Comsec are able to fully understand the new skeleton and build upon it with knowledge and certainty, savings time and cost through future deployments.

Similar to the first key value add, framework training will prove to be vital to the Comsec team as they venture into more serverless workflows and machine learning modelling. This project was Comsec’s first taste of many framework standards, such as Terraform and GitHub Actions, allowing them to build more automated processes within the AWS cloud for future projects.

This project has seen Comsec begin to harness the power of managed machine learning services, such as Amazon Comprehend (for natural language and sentiment processing) and Amazon Translate (for highly customisable language translation).