In this week’s episode, Mihika Pethe, Channel Partner Manager, Pravin Patil, Managing Partner, and Robert Antony, Senior Solutions Architect, from Kapstone Technologies will take a deep dive into the data analytics at Kapstone Technologies, including: new projects, strengths, major wins, and architecting solutions.
Speaker 1: On behalf of AWS and Carahsoft, we would like to welcome you to today's podcast for our federal podcast series where Mihika Pethe, Robert Antony and Pravin Patil from Kapstone will discuss data analytics. Mihika Pethe. The floor is all yours.
Mihika Pethe: Thank you, Sydney. So everyone I am Mihika. I'm the channel Partner Manager with Kapstone Technologies with me I have Pravin and Robert like Sydney just said. Pravin is the managing partner of Kapstone Technologies and also a founding member. With me, Robert here is one of Kapstone Senior solution architects. So I welcome all our listeners to this exciting Carahsoft AWS podcast. Having said that, I'm going to go ahead and ask Pravin, our first question. Pravin, could you tell us more about Kapstone? And all things we do here? And what are Kapstone's strengths?
Pravin Patil: Sure, Mihika. Again, first of all, thanks, everyone for listening our podcast today. So I will give a quick overview about the Kapstone and some of our key strengths into the cloud space. So Kapstone is a niche cybersecurity company established in 2013. We are mainly into the cybersecurity and cloud, we are AWS advanced your partner, and are more focused in cybersecurity is identity access management, threat intelligence DevSecOps and the cloud side, we are strengthened to federal and SLG, state and local with the deep cloud expertise. We specialize into the security, compliance and governance. We have expertise into moving the legacy workload to the cloud security. We have expertise migrating the workload from on premises to the cloud. With the modernization aspect, like organization and refactoring for the infrastructure application and the database tier. We are specialized into the serverless. We have multiple specialization into serverless like lambda, or kinases, API gateway and stuff like that. A lot of focus into the DevOps, DevSecOps automation, deep expertise into the analytics data lake AI ml side, which we're going to talk in more detail in this podcast. 90% of our consultant are AWS certified with advanced and different specialization. And as I said, we are advanced here partner, specialize public sector partner and other certification like a serverless. Security will architect emotion day. So Mihika, I will hand back to you and look forward to the little discussion about the data analytics and the security today.
Mihika Pethe: Absolutely. Thank you so much for being so Robert, my next question goes to you. Can you please tell us about a project that you faced challenges in in how did you overcome them?
Robert Antony: Yeah, sure. So I would say one of the recent projects that we did in the health sector so this is more of related to COVID-19 data where we had to get data from various data sources. The sources that we can get the data are mainly from either API gateway, or kinases, firehose. The data is then transformed into required formats using our services like lambda and glue. The data is then pushed into s3, where we read the data using AWS, Athena, which is also consumed by various visualization tools. And as far as far as the security is concerned, the data is encrypted at transit. And at rest, the API gateways are protected by either using lambda authorizers or API keys. And omega to your question about the challenges. Yes, we have indeed faced a number of challenges, especially during the architecture phase where we had to integrate our solutions with third party vendors. Since we don't have any control over the solution, we had to tweak our architecture to ensure a smooth integration. To give you an example, in one of our recent tasks, like we had to get a data from a third party vendor and they did not have a proper solution to expose the data. All they could do was dump the data into flat file and save it to one of their cloud storage. The flat file that we caught, was never cleansed and had numerous number of data issues. One of the solutions that they quoted was over 40,000 US dollars per month, which was incredibly expensive. We did approach other third party vendors as well and all of their solutions were expensive too. And so what we came up with is like a custom solution from our side where we developed a Python script to overcome this issue which turned out to be very economical and effective all what we had to do was spin up an EC two instance write our own logic. And to pull the data from their system, we used something called our clone job. And that data once we got into the EC two instance, we just converted it to the required format and then push it to s3 for reporting.
Mihika Pethe: That's interesting. That was a smart move. Robert, that brings me to my next question. How does Kapstone do it solutions architecturally?
Robert Antony: Well at Kapstone we follow the AWS well architected practice that keeps our cloud architects built a secure, high performing resilient and efficient infrastructure for their applications and workloads. AWS well architected provides a consistent approach to evaluate architects and implement designs and that can scale over time AWS well architected is based on his five pillars operational excellence, security, reliability, performance, efficiency, and cost optimization. Let me deep dive into each of these five pillars. The first one is operational excellence pillar, the operational excellence pillar focuses on running and monitoring systems to deliver business values, and continually improving the process and procedures for example, including automating changes, responding to events and defining standards to manage daily operations. The second pillar is the security pillar, the security pillar focuses on protecting information systems. So for example, confidentiality and integrity of the data identity, identifying and managing who can do what with the privilege management, protecting systems and establishing controls to detect security events? The third pillar is the reliability pillar. The reliability pillar focuses on ensuring a workload performs its intended function correctly and consistently when it is expected to a resilient workload quickly recovers from failures and meets the customer demands, for example, distributed system design, recovery planning and how to handle changes. The fourth one would be the performance efficiency pillar, the performance efficiency pillar focuses on using it and computing resources efficiently. Some of the scenarios are selecting the right resource types and sizes based on the workload requirements, monitoring performance and making informed decisions to maintain efficiency as business needs to evolve. Last, but not the least, the cost optimization pillar, one of the most important pillar, the cost optimization pillar focuses on avoiding the unnecessary costs, say for example, like understanding and controlling where the money is being spent selecting the most appropriate and right number of resource types analyzing spending over scaling the to meet the business needs without overspending.
Mihika Pethe: Thank you, Robert. And I appreciate you giving us a deep dive for the five pillars. Pravin, I would like to ask you what are the current trends you see in the industry?
Pravin Patil: Absolutely, Mihika, like what we're seeing like specifically into federal and SLG market, the cloud security and analytics are the key team are emerging, basically, as Robert mentioned, right, we are involved into multiple US Department of Health Agencies for COVID related analytics, where we have to create the data lake data analytics platform for your contact tracing, vaccination, exposure notification, and build that really into the rapid form basically, and this was like a very visible reporting where the report used to go to the girl, Governor's Office and the public facing dashboard. So the time frame was very less. And that's what we seeing into this. Government agencies where they are looking a lot of analytics solution like ticker, Department of Finance, or department of correction, where we are working to generate the report for the public sector officers, where they how all the siloed reporting right now. And that takes like weeks and weeks to generate a report monthly report. And with AWS native services, with a lot of automation and our expertise, were able to build this into like, literally more than two months and make that reports available for the public safety with all the security baked in using the AWS security native services. So security become like really critical on this analytics platform. Other world theme we're seeing is like get the personal centric data platform or data analytics connecting with your on premise data also, right? Because not everything on the cloud particular. Government agencies there is a lot of stuff is on premise. So how you solve that problem. So we build the practice, we build like data movement services, right? We build like, persona centric data platform for All the users on AWS and personal centrix in the sense like in the organization, you have your enterprise data services group, where you can sell them using the API gateway, like your extra mile agency, like one agency we are working, where this is like a state level data lake, we build using the AWS. And they have to interact with other agencies securely using the API gateway architecture. So other is like a business user where you can get your data from your on premise or cloud and put that into s3. And using Athena Glue for all the massaging or transformation and use the quick site or the Tableau for the visualization, right are your IP users can go to Athena. And write some queries and get some reporting out of that. We want to satisfy this data scientist person or two where we can get the data from your s3 and put that in to the sage maker where the data scientist can use that for AI ml capabilities. And the same thing for the data warehouse, where you put this data into the redshift kind of environment where you can get like all the trending analysis you can do using the data warehouse user group. So these are the maker key themes we're seeing where people need like, because what was happening into the government agencies, many organization or agencies, they want to move their data from this siloed environment to add one central place, and where you can do aggregate massage, slice and dice. Put that to Sage maker for AI ML capabilities. And we have like, because of expertise, we build some assets and isolators around that so well. We have like a quick turnaround for this projects where we can get this data lake data platform for this government agencies in a very cost effective and very quick manner.
Mihika Pethe: That is amazing. Pravin. Thank you so much. I'm sure our listeners would love to know how Kapstone and AWS and Carahsoft can help them better. And listeners, please feel free to reach out to us with any questions or if you need any more information to ask us about our specials like free consultations and a few others reach us at sales@kapstone.com for any more queries. Thank you so much, Sydney.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Mihika. If you would like more information on how Carahsoft or AWS can assist you please visit www.carahsoft.com or email us at AWS@carahsoft.com. Thanks again for listening and have a great day.