Enterprise-grade delivery at startup speed; industry leaders choose Slalom

Slalom provides dedicated teams of seasoned technologists, business advisors, data scientists, and change practitioners to help companies achieve their most ambitious business goals. As an AWS Premier Consulting Partner, we can help you define and build your future, faster.

Our financial services expertise ranges across multiple industry segments including insurance, capital markets, retail banking, fintech, and credit card processing. Applying our expertise, we keep an unwavering eye on the right business outcome for your needs.

We tackle our customers' hardest challenges such as mission-critical system integration, radical acceleration of decision-making processes and innovative customer segmentation strategies—all within the security and compliance frameworks your business demands.

Our purpose is to help you reach for and realize your vision by quickly delivering tangible outcomes for your business. We leverage our best thinking to help you achieve transformational change through the application of AWS cloud technology and modern software practices.

Learn more about why some of the leading companies in the world selected Slalom to help them solve their toughest business challenges:

Right data, right time

We helped the State Department Federal Credit Union (SDFCU) revolutionize its tech stack with AWS, Alteryx, and Tableau—bringing IT and analysts together to deliver business-critical insights to the entire organization.

Why

With outdated, manual reporting techniques and limited informational views, SDFCU needed to undergo a true digital transformation. It wanted to bridge silos (in both systems and departments), leverage new technologies, and implement machine learning.

The company also needed to drive efficiency and minimize rework while increasing its speed to market and reducing overall operational costs. Most importantly, it wanted to better enable innovation within the organization.

What

Slalom helped SDFCU introduce new tools and technologies in order to create a more modern data analytics platform. Data marts were broken out by subject areas, creating a single source of truth (or a centralized information hub) which encourages coordinated decision-making across the enterprise.

Custom dashboards were also introduced, providing more actionable insights. SDFCU's data is now tangible and much easier to understand, which drives better decision making.

Wow

The new cloud infrastructure allowed SDFCU to ramp up quickly and speed up its “go to market” capabilities. And the introduction of automated systems reduced manual errors.

SDFCU completely revolutionized the way it performs analysis and delivers valuable insights to the business. It can now drive impactful insights quickly with flexible, secure, and always-current cloud data storage (instead of legacy on-premises options).

The organization is also saving money by replacing outdated systems with a new tech stack that works seamlessly together. This enables its teams to respond faster to member needs and regulatory changes and provides them with more and better insights.

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Assess and secure

We helped a developer and provider of credit products, including non-prime credit, assess its proposed AWS strategy in order to follow best practice guidelines and meet business and operational needs. This enabled the organization to take advantage of everything AWS has to offer.

Why

In November 2017, our client moved several workloads back on premise after experiencing reliability issues with an alternate cloud service provider. It needed help transitioning back to a “cloud first” approach so that it could better architect and design future applications.

What

The engagement began with a Well Architected Review (WAR) of several proof of concept workloads that were already running in AWS. Following the WAR findings report, Slalom was engaged to perform a detailed platform assessment of the client’s AWS environment. The security review documented the best practices and governance framework for future rollouts.

Leveraging AWS partner funding, the client further partnered with Slalom to implement a foundation in AWS that incorporated the best practices and governance from the previous phase.

Wow

The client deployed its proprietary risk modeling engine in AWS leveraging Elastic MapReduce (EMR). The scalability, speed, and security of the AWS platform empowers the company to better serve current and future customers.

The company now enjoys a scalable, stable, fully automated platform in AWS that aligns with AWS's Well Architected Framework. We helped the company integrate AWS services with traditional security tools in a manner that satisfied the requirements of the client's security team, and also creates buy-in for cloud technologies. With a managed Hadoop environment in less than ten minutes, it can now provide real-time credit decisioning.

AWS and Slalom continue to provide guidance as the client's team members transition to a "cloud first" approach and architect and design future applications. We're also partnering with the client on rearchitecting existing applications, plus training for development teams as they transition fully into modern development methodologies.

Next-gen analytics platform

We helped a leading financial services company expand its analytical capacity to invigorate innovation, improve operational efficiency, and enable sustainability.

Why

In an increasingly competitive business environment, a well-known direct bank and payment services company needed to enhance its capacity to quickly generate, validate, and operationalize new analytical models.

The company’s analytical capacity was constrained by several challenges. The existing on-premise Hadoop cluster was reaching capacity and utilization limits and current rates of growth will require significant scale-out to meet demand. Development teams and analytics end users were already experiencing significant performance issues. The addition of infrastructure to scale out the on-premise cluster would require months for procurement and set-up. Data stores in the cloud needed to be fully secured to store sensitive data and had to be highly available and accessible. Security best practices, including maintaining a threat model and executing appropriate incident response processes, were imperative.

What

Slalom was engaged as the partner to help build the client’s first-generation data platform in AWS. Slalom helped design the data lake architecture for the cloud and align the many stakeholders across multiple business, data analytics, infrastructure, and security teams.

Slalom also designed and developed a CI/CD pipeline using Terraform and other tools to automate the infrastructure build for all AWS components: Amazon S3 for scaled and secured storage; Amazon EMR for analytics; and a combination of AWS Lambda, Amazon CloudWatch, and AWS CloudTrail for secured monitoring and notification.

The solution was the first iteration of the future data lake for our client and its first production workload in the cloud.

Wow

The client now has a flexible and scalable platform for deploying analytic workloads on AWS and a foundational pipeline for automation of AWS infrastructure. The company's infrastructure is now cloud first and agile and capable of changing direction in an instant. This platform will accelerate the movement of source data and analytics workloads to the cloud and provide for the development of data science tools to quickly develop deeper insights into their business.

Data Marketplace

We helped the data office of a global financial information and analytics company break down siloes and empower users with a powerful analytical sandbox environment.

Why

Our client provides financial information and analytics for a wide variety of business and use cases, from stock indexes and energy pricing to companies and debt. The organization’s many data sources exist in silos across the organization, inhibiting collaboration, slowing innovation, and limiting new product creation. The company’s chief data officer envisioned a Data Marketplace—an open data environment where any user could explore, request, and experiment with the organization’s data.

What

This Data Marketplace is a custom web application that users interact with to request and filter datasets, manage their sandboxes, and launch their virtualized tools. The Marketplace is a node.js / Angular2 web application on EC2 and is integrated with existing data access mechanisms (e.g., APIs). As users make data requests, the Marketplace abstracts the technical complexity away from the business users by launching Cloud Formation scripts to spin up the S3 buckets and making the appropriate API calls to fetch the desired data. Additionally, users can launch their own data science and visualization tools from the Marketplace. These tools, such as RStudio, are hosted in Docker containers on ECS.

AWS products and services like EC2, S3, Cloud Formation, and ECS, were selected because of the proven performance in a global context and the scalability to handle 2 to 2000 users. With AWS, the Data Marketplace enables users to bring requested datasets into their sandboxes and use a suite of data science and visualization tools to experiment and innovate—all in the AWS cloud.

Wow

The initial application rolled out in December 2017 with extremely positive feedback from the initial user-base. As one user commented, having access to the Data Marketplace saved her weeks of time from having to search and request specific datasets. Rollout to global employees began in early 2018.