Educational Platform Scalability and Reliability

Customer Challenges

Catalyst Commodities operates in energy and commodities markets where uptime, transaction speed, and security directly impact revenue. As trading volumes increased and market volatility intensified, the existing infrastructure required stronger resilience, proactive monitoring, security controls, and operational governance.

Key challenges included:

• Requirement for uninterrupted 24/7 trading operations
• Latency sensitivity for real-time financial transactions
• Security, encryption, and access control requirements for financial data
• No proactive infrastructure monitoring or capacity management
• No continuous threat detection or structured incident response capability
• Lack of vulnerability management and automated patching processes
• No validated disaster recovery or business continuity planning
• Cloud cost fluctuations during demand spikes

Catalyst required a managed services partner capable of delivering continuous infrastructure operations, security monitoring, incident response, compliance governance, and cost optimisation.ing continuous operational oversight, compliance monitoring, and 24/7 support.

 

Scalable Financial Infrastructure for 5+ Million global customers

Our Solution

CloudiQS designed and deployed a secure, high-availability AWS architecture with comprehensive operational and security controls for Catalyst’s trading environment.

Cloud Infrastructure:

• Multi-AZ EC2 Auto Scaling Groups for resilient trading application servers built from CIS-hardened AMIs
• Amazon RDS Multi-AZ with automated backups, KMS encryption, and SSL-enforced connections
• Tiered VPC architecture with public, inspection, private application, and isolated data subnets
• Amazon CloudWatch dashboards with custom metrics for trading throughput, latency percentiles, and infrastructure health
• Infrastructure as Code via AWS CloudFormation for repeatable, auditable deployments
• CI/CD pipelines via AWS CodePipeline with security scanning gates

Security Architecture:

• Amazon GuardDuty for continuous threat detection across all accounts
• AWS Security Hub with FSBP and CIS benchmarks for centralised security posture management
• Amazon Inspector for automated vulnerability scanning across compute workloads
• AWS Network Firewall with stateful deep packet inspection and custom threat signature rules
• AWS Shield Advanced for DDoS protection on internet-facing trading endpoints
• AWS WAF with managed and custom rule groups for application-layer protection
• AWS KMS with customer-managed keys and automatic rotation for financial data encryption
• AWS CloudTrail organisation trail with log file validation for complete API audit logging
• AWS Config with compliance rules monitoring configuration continuously
• Amazon EventBridge routing operational and security events to CloudiQS via PagerDuty

Resilience Architecture:

Documented RTO and RPO targets with quarterly validation testing

AWS Backup with automated daily and weekly plans

Cross-region backup replication for disaster recovery

Amazon S3 Object Lock for immutable backup storage

Zero Downtime, 75% Faster Loading, 50% District Growth

Ongoing AWS Managed Services and Managed Security Services

• Following deployment, Catalyst engaged CloudiQS under an ongoing AWS Managed Services agreement covering both infrastructure operations and security operations. CloudiQS provides:
• Infrastructure and Operations Management:
• 24/7 infrastructure monitoring via Amazon CloudWatch with real-time alerting and automated escalation
• Proactive capacity management and performance tuning for low-latency trading workloads
• Automated patch management through AWS Systems Manager Patch Manager with scheduled maintenance windows
• Database performance tuning, query optimisation, and storage management
• Proactive scaling management during periods of market volatility
• CI/CD pipeline management and deployment support with rollback procedures
• Monthly cost optimisation reviews including right-sizing, Reserved Instance coverage, and unused resource identification
• Quarterly architecture reviews against AWS Well-Architected Framework
• Security Operations:
• Continuous threat detection via Amazon GuardDuty, AWS Security Hub, and Amazon Inspector with 24/7 SOC monitoring
• NIST 800-61 aligned incident response with P1 acknowledgment SLA under 20 minutes
• Continuous vulnerability management with risk-prioritised remediation tracking
• IAM governance including quarterly access reviews, least-privilege enforcement, and IAM Access Analyzer monitoring
• Network security management including WAF rule tuning, Shield Advanced oversight, and Network Firewall rule updates
• Encryption lifecycle management including KMS key rotation and ACM certificate renewal
• Security posture improvement tracking via Security Hub compliance scores
• Resilience and Business Continuity:
• Multi-region backup validation and integrity testing
• Quarterly disaster recovery drills against documented RTO/RPO targets
• Immutable backup architecture preventing tampering or deletion
• Business continuity planning and readiness assessment
• Governance and Reporting:
• Monthly operational reports covering uptime, incident trends, patch compliance, security posture, and cost
• Quarterly strategic reviews with customer leadership
• CloudiQS MSP Portal providing real-time dashboards across Security, Cost, Operations, Resilience, and Engineering dimensions
• CloudiQS operates as Catalyst’s outsourced cloud operations and security operations team, delivering continuous infrastructure management, threat detection, incident response, and security governance for mission-critical trading systems.

Scalable Financial Infrastructure for 5+ Million Customers

The Results

Reliability and Uptime:

• Achieved 99.97% uptime across trading environments
• Eliminated peak-hour trading instability
• Validated quarterly disaster recovery capability

Performance:

• Reduced transaction latency by 40%
• Supported increased trading volumes without infrastructure redesign

Security:

• Reduced high-severity security incidents by over 60%
• Sub-20-minute acknowledgment for critical incidents
• Continuous security posture monitoring and improvement

Cost and Operations:

• Reduced infrastructure costs through continuous optimisation
• Improved deployment stability and operational consistency
• Improved business continuity readiness through immutable backup architecture

AWS Services:
Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, Amazon CloudWatch, AWS CloudFormation, AWS CodePipeline, Amazon GuardDuty, AWS Security Hub, Amazon Inspector, AWS Network Firewall, AWS Shield Advanced, AWS WAF, AWS KMS, AWS CloudTrail, AWS Config, Amazon EventBridge, AWS Systems Manager, AWS Backup, Amazon S3, AWS Organizations, AWS Control Tower, IAM Identity Center, Amazon VPC