PA and Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Vision Analytics provides web-like data to physical retail, including the number and type of visitors, dwell time and cart abandonment. Using AWS Panorama and our world-leading consumer experience and machine learning capabilities, Vision Analytics helps retailers better understand customer behaviour across their physical stores. With the ability to use existing CCTV and other cameras, Vision Analytics reduces the need for expensive re-fits and offers more insightful data than traditional traffic counters.

The Wellbeing Automated Call Service (WACS) uses artificial intelligence to automatically check on vulnerable people and triage their needs. During the coronavirus pandemic, several local authorities across the UK have been using WACS to deliver support to people more quickly and efficiently.

The impact of WACS has been widely recognised and was also selected as the winner of the 2021 Amazon Web Services’ Global Public Sector Partner award for Most Valuable Amazon Connect Deployment.

Migration Competency

Migrating to AWS is an iterative process that evolves as you develop new skills, processes, tools and capabilities. Initial migrations build experience and momentum that accelerate later migration efforts. The greatest barrier to high-impact cloud benefits is a failure to transform business operations and technology ways of working to match this. So, we combine value creation, sustainable cloud operations and cost-effective technology migration into a single approach.

Using our PA Cloud Migration Method, we anticipate the timeline of activities over the next 18 to 24 months and the key milestones along the journey. Each stage of our method aligns to a set of activities that combine to effectively assess, plan and migrate applications to AWS cloud while making optimisations and identifying new business services.

Our five-stage approach

1. Value, strategy and operating model
2. Discovery, technology and foundations
3. Pilot, architecture and resilience
4. Migration, DevSecOps and scaling
5. Optimise, transform and renew

Our approach considers risks, challenges and the art of the possible, resulting in a reliable, optimised solution that future-proofs your organisation.

Our Migration Competency with AWS underpins all this. This gives us access to funding and credits for our clients to accelerate the path to cloud without incurring unwelcome costs.

Government Competency

We combine deep government and public sector knowledge with expertise in large-scale, cloud-enabled IT transformations to help you tackle your immediate challenges and deliver tangible benefits. For example, we used the latest AWS technology to deliver the largest and most complex cloud transformation in the UK Government, the Home Office Immigration Technology Cloud Transformation. The project won the 2017 UK IT Industry Award for ‘Best Use of Cloud Services’ and Cloud Excellence Award 2017 for ‘Best Overall Use of Cloud’.

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Public safety and disaster response Competency

We provide expertise to help transform your organisation so you can leverage the power of AWS to protect the public and prepare for, respond to and recover from natural or man-made emergencies and disasters. For example, we designed, built and optimised a new donations platform for the British Red Cross, one of the UK’s largest charities, which can withstand enormous spikes of traffic during large-scale emergency appeals.

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DevOps Competency

Using the latest thinking in Scaled Agile and Lean 6-Sigma, as well as market-leading automation implementation methods, we help you employ the right AWS technologies and develop the culture, people and processes to maximise them.

For example, at the Home Office, as part of their AWS migration, we led the DevOps transformation work to enable faster releases to production while maintaining quality assurance. Our DevOps specialists developed the Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipeline using AWS CloudFormation, Jenkins, Helm, Puppet, Packer and Git to build, test and release automatically. We leveraged this pipeline to deploy AWS services like Amazon EC2, Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon S3 and Amazon RDS as Infrastructure as Code (IaC). The new infrastructure that supports the platform also lets the technology team build and release new capability in six minutes instead of a day.

At the British Red Cross, we designed, built and optimised a new solution on AWS that can withstand enormous spikes in traffic during large-scale emergency appeals. We designed and implemented a path to production on AWS that enabled CI/CD of application releases. We automated deployment of AWS services like Amazon EC2, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Elastic Load Balancers, Amazon CloudFront and RDS. The mission-critical platform built on AWS supported over 33,000 concurrent users and won the 2018 Sitecore Experience Award category for ‘Best ROI from a digital experience’.

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Data & Analytics Competency

We combine platform delivery, business transformation and deep sector knowledge with data engineering and integration expertise to unlock the full potential of your data. We’ve used innovative AWS services such as Amazon Redshift, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Athena, Elastic Search, Quicksight, EMR and AWS Glue to enable successful cloud-based analytics transformations for our clients and empower them to become data-driven and disruptive.

For example, at Water Source, PA Consulting led the design and development of a de-centralised water treatment facility. We did this using AWS’s analytics and IOT service suites to monitor and measure the key components of the water treatment unit. We developed data-driven intelligence to ensure that the quality of water meets the potability standards and manage the performance of the unit itself. Often based in remote & hostile environments, it was imperative that data was analysed in real-time so that the local communities were getting clean, safe, drinking water. Our IOT and Data engineers used IOT Core, RTOS, Lambda, IOT Analytics, Amazon QuickSight, Amazon S3 and Amazon DynamoDB to create the analytics platform that remotely monitored and ran the water treatment units.

At the Home Office, PA Consulting led and built a new centralised logging platform on AWS as part of the scalable hosting platform. The centralised logging platform combined over 250 distributed microservices to enable efficient aggregation of data across these services. Using data engineering and integration patterns, we developed and implemented a hot-warm AWS ElasticSearch service and leveraged several other AWS services such as Amazon Quicksight, Kafka, Amazon S3, EBS, Amazon CloudWatch, Elastic Load Balancing and autoscaling to build a cost-optimised, resilient and scalable platform. The platform has enabled efficient and detailed transaction tracing across numerous products which have now been rolled out on the AWS hosting platform.

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Well Architected Reviews

With over 1,500 new cloud services updated and launched every year, it is important that your infrastructure is current. Modern cloud architectures are dynamic, not static, and the Well Architected Framework and Reviews will give you the tools, skills and processes to adopt an evergreen cloud environment.

Our market leading approach and long-standing relationship with AWS, allows for a structured review of your cloud infrastructure, we enhance that with our unique understanding of your business, that will help bring ingenuity to life.

We are an AWS Premier Tier Services partner that can help you review, design and build a better cloud infrastructure. We will ensure that your technology portfolio runs efficiently, is cost optimised, to take advantage of the latest AWS services.

Accelerate innovation

Here is what a Well Architected Review could help you achieve:

• Review your workloads across six AWS Well Architected pillars
• Train and mentor your development and operations staff to embed Well Architected into your software development lifecycle checklist, ensuring the right decisions and assurance is in place regarding your AWS and other Cloud environments
• We will help you evaluate your workloads for potential risks and help you define how well your architecture aligns with AWS best practices for operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimization, and sustainability
• Design and implement improvement plans that fit your business
• Following an AWS Well Architected Framework Review, we will help you identify next steps for improvement, and can assist with remediating potential risks in your work loads
• We will identify how your investment is best leveraged based upon the needs and maturity of your business