AWS & Application Services — Ongoing Maintenance and Support

GoSource delivered ongoing maintenance, monitoring, security hardening and helpdesk support for eight DAFF systems to keep them compliant, available and cost-efficient.

Challenge

Eight critical systems, all of which had to stay secure, available and compliant while the policy and cybersecurity requirements around them kept moving.

The risk in this kind of work is slow rather than dramatic. Nothing fails on any given day. Dependencies age, policies change, small bugs accumulate, and eventually the gap is wide enough that the only remedy is an expensive rewrite of something that was working.

Solution

We run the support and maintenance for all eight under the AWS and Application Services agreement: helpdesk, monitoring, patching, enhancement and the infrastructure underneath.

Monitoring is automated and manual together, aimed at catching things before users do. Improvements get triggered three ways: by an alert, by user feedback, or by something new becoming available that is worth adopting.

The security posture changed most when we put a Web Application Firewall across every web-facing system. Alongside that, libraries, tools and dependencies are updated on a cycle rather than at audit, and automated tooling checks code against language-specific practice.

AWS resources are reviewed continuously for right-sizing, with load balancing spreading traffic so no single component carries a peak alone. The helpdesk runs in agreed business hours, triaged by severity: a critical outage gets attention immediately, lower-severity work is queued against everything else rather than jumping it.

Outcomes

99.74% uptime across all eight systems in 2023, above the business target.

In March 2024 alone the firewall detected and neutralised 141,879 threats. No data breaches, and no security-related downtime.

Support inside business hours is close to immediate, and the feedback reflects it. Policy and standards compliance holds across every system because the updates never stop. Resource management stays efficient without users reporting slowdowns at peak. And the systems themselves stay fit for purpose, through enhancement rather than replacement.

Technologies

AWS, including EC2, load balancing and resource monitoring. A Web Application Firewall. Automated code compliance scanning. Helpdesk ticketing and triage. Proactive patching and version upgrades. Unit and system testing. Stakeholder reporting fortnightly and monthly.