The company
MathsOnline is an Australian company that provides interactive online maths curriculums for kindergarten to year 12 students and teachers across Australia, New Zealand, the US and the UK. Used by over 500,000 students, MathsOnline provides over 57,000 interactive questions and over 1,400 animated lessons aimed at transforming children’s math results by allowing students to self-pace, stop and rewind.
We spoke to Stephen Murray, Software Engineer at MathsOnline on how they have achieved a more reliable, scalable and secure environment to deliver better customer experiences.
The challenge
MathsOnline’s core business is providing educational content and they “needed to keep re-focusing on helping our software developers and content providers to do their core work,” said Stephen. They found their software platform was tightly integrated with their incumbent service provider’s hardware, causing scaling to be difficult, time-consuming, and costly.
Overtime, MathsOnline found their bespoke application had grown in complexity which meant they were performing builds, deployment and synchronisation across servers and they wanted to replace this with industry recognised tools and processes to improve efficiencies.
With data obligations to their customers, which includes government and private institutions, and the rapidly evolving data privacy laws, MathsOnline needed to migrate their customer data to ensure privacy and security compliance continued to be met, as well as partner with an Australian-based company.
With no dedicated account manager from their previous provider, MathsOnline found they weren’t benefiting from outside ideas or continuity of service and found the “engineers working on our environment were only passingly familiar with our setup at best,” Stephen said. They needed a dedicated service provider to help them achieve their goals and provide continual service improvement.
The solution
After interviewing three companies, including AC3, Stephen said “we immediately felt we were in capable hands”. MathsOnline partnered with AC3 to design and build their AWS infrastructure, migrate their environment and provide dedicated managed services to maintain uptime, scalability and security.
AC3 built a best practice and secure three-tier VPC layout with MathsOnline webservers deployed in a private application layer. The database is hosted in Amazon’s Aurora RDS providing high availablility and best in class performance. The application servers reside in private subnets with access provided by Amazon’s latest Application Load Balancer. AC3 migrated the domains to Amazon Route 53 and introduced Amazon CloudFront CDN to improve the efficiencies of content delivery, ensuring consistent customer experiences globally.
AC3 worked with MathsOnline to introduce a suite of AWS security services ensuring best practice protection for customers and the organisation.
With managed services and a Technical Account Manager, AC3 is able to provide MathsOnline with 24x7 coverage and offer proactive advice and recommendations to assist with continual service improvement. Through proactive management, AC3’s Technical Account Manager continuously works with MathsOnline to analyse their existing workloads, providing recommendations on cost, performance and new emerging AWS services.
The results
"By partnering with AC3, we’ve reduced the time spent managing our environment, allowing us to concentrate on our core skill, which is product development,” said Stephen.
“With AC3 closely monitoring our important metrics, they help us avoid problems well ahead of time and their deep understanding of their products, along with their understanding of our business and processes, allows them to identify linkages and potential benefits proactively.”
“Their trusted name in managed services helps MathsOnline in our capacity as a service provider to government departments. They've directly assisted us with reaching and exceeding our compliance requirements, in particular those relating to network security, data privacy and encryption.”
“To work with AC3 is to have an expert team fill the gap between our company's core skills and our customer's expectation,” concludes Stephen.
