As Koala’s chosen multi-cloud partner, DoiT started work with Koala in November 2022 with an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Well-Architected Framework review of Koala’s AWS workloads. So began a journey of tightening Koala’s infrastructure best practices across both its AWS and Google Cloud services, while hardening the company’s security profile.

Refining the digital product with a customer-first mindset

With DoiT’s expertise, the Koala team worked on both its cloud infrastructure and its work practices to ensure it was able to continue offering the best digital product to its customers. As well as advising Koala on implementing the latest cloud technology, DoiT also helped Koala to implement best practices in monitoring site performance issues and fixing them responsively as they arose. “DoiT has proved to be a great partner in helping us to keep on top of problems so that we can maintain a high level of customer experience and engagement,” says Sladen.

With the help of DoiT’s DevOps expertise and workshops, Koala also increased the speed at which it could execute new developments, enabling the Koala team to deploy new products and features to customers as fast as possible, further enhancing the customer experience.

Adopting industry best practice to harden the security profile

With a vast amount of customer financial data in its possession, Koala takes security seriously. Following DoiT’s Well-Architected Framework review of its AWS infrastructure, DoiT and Koala began a series of weekly sessions to work through ways to bolster Koala’s security profile. This included making numerous valuable security improvements to Koala’s infrastructure, as well as ensuring that Koala’s security monitoring and alerting procedures aligned to AWS best practices. As a result, Koala was able to implement the most effective security policies to cover its AWS workloads.

“DoiT has really helped our security practices,” says Sladen. “Together, we went on a journey to strengthen our overall security and tighten up those loose ends that show up in IT operations over time. DoiT took the burden off our shoulders and supported us through the more challenging security monitoring and notification work.”

Optimizing compute spend with DoiT cost optimization

With DoiT, Koala was also able to automatically optimize its compute spend. By analyzing its CPU usage, DoiT gave Koala clear insights into its AWS and Google Cloud workloads to assess where usage could be optimized and costs could be saved, giving Koala the flexibility to manage its cloud usage without making expensive commitments. “DoiT cost optimization is a unique offering that helped us to put various savings mechanisms in place to help us to optimize our bill automatically, without having to remember to keep putting these policies in place,” says Sladen. “Not only did it save us money, the automating saved us time, too.”