Client
The Entrust Group is a U.S. provider of self-directed IRA services, allowing individuals to invest their retirement funds in alternative assets such as real estate, private equity, and precious metals. The company combines deep industry expertise and technology-driven solutions to make self-direction accessible for those seeking control and flexibility in their retirement strategies.
Challenge
Over many years, Entrust’s core landscape evolved into a third-party record-keeping platform, along with a proprietary client portal that also served as the central integration layer. Instability, performance issues, and growing technical debt led to serious production incidents each year, ad hoc deployments with multi-hour downtime, and no defined SLAs or clear ownership for incident resolution. These issues increased operational and reputational risk, slowing the release of portal features and improvements necessary to maintain a competitive client experience.
As Entrust’s AWS technology partner, DataArt assumed full technology stewardship in a seven-week transition with no critical outages. We stabilized the existing AWS-based environment, introduced time-boxed incident management, and replaced ad hoc deployments with a predictable release process. This created a stable base for continuous portal enhancements and more reliable feature delivery to Entrust’s clients.
Technical Impact/Benefits
- Improved stability and a predictable release cadence reduced outage risk on revenue-critical AWS-hosted platforms, enabling product and business teams to plan and ship portal enhancements without constant firefighting.
- Clear operational ownership and governance, with a single escalation path for production and releases, resulting in reduced ambiguity and coordination overhead.
- A prioritized optimization roadmap and rebuilt cloud environment reduced operational overhead and created a solid foundation for the next wave of business and product changes.
Technology Stack
- Core systems: Third-party record-keeping platform as the system of record for client and account data, plus a proprietary client portal as both client front end and central integration layer across multiple internal and external systems.
- Cloud & Infrastructure (AWS): AWS-based cloud environment rebuilt and optimized to improve scalability, maintainability, and deployment efficiency, while reducing operational overhead and supporting controlled, low-downtime releases.
- Operations, Monitoring & Governance: Structured monitoring, centralized ticketing, and incident management with defined response targets, underpinned by security and well-architected reviews and ongoing security advisory within the AWS context.
