About GiveCentral

GiveCentral is a web-based donation platform designed to help nonprofit organizations raise more money. By consolidating all collection, fundraising and communication activities in one place, GiveCentral makes it easier for donors to give, for nonprofits to communicate and for administrators to manage their finances and donor records. Through its customizable, costeffective and versatile platform, GiveCentral enhances the fundraising experience for all those involved.

The Challenge

In 2009, the firm started building its PCI-DSS-compliant solutions on a VPS Service provider. The implementation of the entire system turned out to be lengthy, time-consuming and expensive. Using a traditional environment was eating up a lot of resources and required huge investment and significant, time-consuming ‘heavy lifting’ in basic provisioning and management. But this was not the only challenge the client was facing. In addition to the lengthy setup time and related costs, the solutions were subject to long service breaks adversely affecting the customer experience. This issue became even bigger at the times of high traffic such as during Christmas period and important events like Giving Tuesday. The company needed a highly scalable and flexible infrastructure that could deliver a consistent service. Given the sensitive nature of the financial data that GiveCentral handles, both general system security and ease of PCI DSS compliance were major factors that had to be considered while coming up with a better solution.

The Solution

In order to keep the credit card data safe and secure during transit, processing and storage, PCI DSS requires firms to build and maintain a secure network, maintain a vulnerability management program, protect cardholder data, implement strong and reliable security measures, maintain an information security policy and test and monitor networks on a regular basis. We were able to formulate a perfect solution to this in AWS. AWS is one of the rare environments which is compliant to the standard. In addition to this, AWS provided a complete ecosystem of services, tools and features which is exactly what GiveCentral was looking for. After evaluating the wide variety of existing cloud service providers, it was clear that only AWS offered the flexibility and range of tools to help build the highly scalable and powerful platform that we required.

AWS Services Used: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud(EC2), Elastic Load Balancing(ELB), AWS CloudTrail, Amazon CloudWatch, AWS WAF, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)

The Benefits

Faster design and setup of PCI Compliant Infrastructure.

Especially beneficial to GiveCentral is the reusability of the server infrastructure when it is stored as code. We now have a blueprint that allows us to set up environments quickly for new projects. We launch a lot of new projects, so when we can reuse those first phases, it saves us a lot of time and money.

No Upfront Investment plus Cost Savings

The cost structure of AWS has enabled us to innovate and get our services to market quickly. With the last system, we had to make sure we had all our resources in place from day one. With AWS we don’t need to reserve the hardware and we don’t need to pay upfront, so we save a staggering amount of money all the while maintaining an aggressively growing system in a much better way.

Satisfies PCI DSS requirements

AWS takes care of at least 50 percent of the work that needs to be done to get the PCI DSS approval. All we have to do is show the AWS documentation to the auditors. In addition to this, AWS allowed us to automate manual security tasks which gave us time to shift our focus to scaling and business side of things thus positively impacting the overall business in the longer run. Last but not the least, as we were paying only for the services we were consuming, we managed to create a cost-saving at the same time one of the most effective solution for our client.

About Nuclay Solutons Pvt. Ltd. and AWS

At Nuclay, we are equipped with all the modern technological and digital know how which could provide the most pointed solutions to our clients. Whatever the challenges, we know how to adapt to all the changing circumstances and mould ourselves to suit the same. We believe in being flexible with our working techniques, without straying an inch away from delivering all requirements.

We are passionate about supporting other businesses in their growth. All our clients need to do is focus on their core business while we handle everything else to help them stay ahead.

AWS provides a broad platform of secure, cost-effective, high-performance cloud services that can be used to process and analyze the data stored in your managed database.

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