Accelerating Global Diversity Analysis Using AWS with Diversity Atlas

Diversity Atlas helps organizations better engage with their workforces and communities by securely mapping their diversity to enhance workplaces through data-driven insights. Using its SaaS solution, organizations can collect and analyze comprehensive data about employees’ languages, religions, ethnicities, and other cultural attributes while maintaining privacy and compliance.

Born in the cloud, Diversity Atlas developed its minimum viable product on a single instance of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Spot Instances, which businesses can use to run fault-tolerant workloads taking advantage of unused EC2 capacity in the AWS cloud and are available at up to a 90 percent discount compared to On-Demand prices. As Diversity Atlas began to grow and its infrastructure became more complex, the company needed more than a single Amazon EC2 instance to support its software. Following best practices for factors such as security, privacy, and operational excellence would be crucial for building trust with enterprise customers while handling sensitive data.

Diversity Atlas chose to adopt the AWS Well-Architected Framework, which lets developers understand the pros and cons of decisions they make while building systems on AWS. Using that framework, Diversity Atlas was able to validate that its SaaS architecture followed security and operational best practices as it continued to rapidly develop and innovate.

“As soon as we started gaining customers, we had to think about scalability, reliability, and global reach,” says Rezza Moieni, chief technology officer at Diversity Atlas. “Those parameters are well documented in the AWS Well-Architected Framework, and giving attention to them has helped us grow and enter new markets.”

Diversity Atlas built its SaaS solution on AWS using the AWS Well-Architected Framework as its foundation so that the company could scale globally while maintaining high security and compliance standards. “So far, we have been deployed in 42 countries, and over 500,000 people have used our SaaS solution,” says Moieni. “When we go to clients in different countries, there are different privacy laws. Validating that our solution and our approach are compliant with local regulations is a challenge. Using AWS, we can build the level of flexibility that we need to accomplish this.”

Diversity Atlas combined the AWS Well-Architected Framework and AWS Trusted Advisor—a service that continuously evaluates the AWS environment using best practice checks. The AWS Well-Architected Framework offers architectural guidance so that the solution can maintain high standards across six pillars: security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimization, operational excellence, and sustainability. AWS Trusted Advisor provides proactive monitoring and recommendations for Diversity Atlas’s environment according to AWS best practices. Thus, the company’s team can optimize resources for cases of overused resources when too many users access the system.

By implementing AWS best practices through regular AWS Well-Architected reviews, Diversity Atlas improved performance by three times while using the same memory resources, and significantly reduced security risks across its development chain. Diversity Atlas’s architecture now supports 100,000 concurrent users—a 10,000-times improvement from its initial capacity—while maintaining 99.999 percent uptime. Thus, the solution remains available when organizations need to conduct large-scale diversity-mapping exercises.

“As soon as there is a gap between the work that we do and AWS best practices, the issue is flagged during our AWS Well-Architected reviews, and we can address it as early as possible during the development phase,” says Moieni. “Thus, we can build new solutions on the right foundation. Using the AWS Well-Architected Framework, we were able to improve our business agility, accelerating our development lifecycle by 30 percent.”

As a further complement to its AWS Well-Architected reviews, Diversity Atlas implemented the AWS Well-Architected Tool, which lets companies learn best practices and apply important design considerations. The company also used the AWS Well-Architected Tool Connector for Jira, which empowers businesses to link Jira accounts with the AWS Well-Architected Tool and sync improvement items from workloads to Jira projects. Consequently, Diversity Atlas gained visibility into how tasks contributed to overall architecture goals, facilitating better prioritization in the use of its preferred organizational system.

Using AWS, Diversity Atlas’s solution can handle sudden spikes in traffic, maintain high security standards for sensitive personal data, and comply with privacy regulations across different countries—all while optimizing costs and development efficiency. “Now, we are freed from service and maintenance. We can focus on developing the business,” says Moieni. “The risks are minimized, and the opportunities are maximized.”

The solution’s robust security and scalability have helped organizations gather unprecedented insights about their workforce diversity. Those insights drive meaningful change, from improving talent retention to creating workplaces that are more representative and better serve their communities.

Looking ahead, Diversity Atlas is expanding its capabilities using artificial intelligence and machine learning on AWS. The team is developing predictive algorithms to help organizations understand how long it might take to close various diversity gaps and achieve their inclusion goals.

“Companies are looking for insights that are going to transform their organizations,” says Michael Walmsley, chief experience officer at Diversity Atlas. “Using AWS and having all this amazing technology, we can build the security and scalability that we need to meet our goals.”