Security Benefit is a retirement company that has been providing innovative investment management solutions for decades. A leader in the U.S. retirement industry, they aim to help their customers have a confident and comfortable retirement. Over the years, they have built their expertise in providing a broad suite of annuities and mutual fund programs. They also believe that everyone deserves financial security and that each individual irrespective of their age has the right to fulfill their aspirations.
Security Benefit's utilization on manual infrastructure provisioning within their AWS environments (Dev, QA, and Prod) created critical bottlenecks with severe business implications involving multiple vendors for virtual machine (VM) creation, onboarding, security, and monitoring, that led to slow onboarding times of up to two weeks that directly hindered the organization's ability to innovate, respond to market changes, and deliver value to clients quickly. The manual approach increased the risk of errors and made it difficult to maintain visibility across environments, compromising operational efficiency and reliability.
Security Benefit partnered with ITTStar to streamline infrastructure provisioning using Terraform and GitLab. After initial requirements gathering, ITTStar developed Terraform templates for EC2 instances and associated resources. To enhance security, ITTStar deployed these templates from GitLab using a project-specific IAM role, successfully provisioning resources in the AWS Dev environment.
Following a successful Dev demo and approvals from the client's infrastructure and security teams, the partner's DevOps engineers merged the templates into the prod branch. Project progress was tracked effectively using Jira.
To further optimize the process, Security Benefit requested the automated integration of new VMs into Active Directory. ITTStar successfully implemented this with additional Terraform templates, reducing EC2 instance provisioning time from two weeks to a single day
AWS provides secure, reliable, scalable, and inexpensive cloud computing services. CloudFormation is the AWS IaC tool that serves as an automation platform. It allows one to implement services or applications without having to set up and configure each service manually, saving considerable time and avoiding the potential for mistakes and inconsistencies.
Given its ease of use and wide-ranging capabilities, CloudFormation has helped the customer to automate the infrastructure management and focus on innovation. The customer was able to provision the EC2 instances along with domain joining within minutes through CFN templates deployed.
Security Benefit chose ITTStar as their trusted partner in their digital transformation journey. They wanted an expert partner for data-driven innovation. ITTStar’s unique approach to solving complex infrastructure and security problems using cloud-native services and their ability to drive innovations attracted the customer to partner with them. As an AWS Select Partner, our confidence comes from our understanding of how to integrate AWS services into our solutions, combined with our broken-down approach to solving holistic business challenges.
Security Benefit is a 125-year-old Kansas-based retirement company that has grown over the years to become one of the fastest-growing companies in the US retirement market. A combination of innovative products, superior investment management, and a unique marketing strategy has made Security Benefit the leader in its comprehensive range of retirement markets and wealth segments.
ITTStar team was able successful in understanding the requirement for the Devsecops project, Automating of infrastructure deployment. Great improvement from Release 0 to Release 1. They started understanding the processes in our company and the end user goal for this project very well. They have been very proactive in most of the tasks and were able to deliver the work on time. I really appreciate their work and effort.
Sahithi Reddy Paspuleti,
AWS Solution Engineer,
Security Benefits