MyHR Expands HR Platform for Mid-Sized Businesses with Cloud-Native Services on AWS

New Zealand–based MyHR offers a comprehensive human resources (HR) solution for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Its software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform provides multiple customizable services for hiring, leave and payroll, performance development, and more, and the company’s HR experts offer practical advice on issues ranging from administration to compliance.

Demand for MyHR continues to grow in key markets like New Zealand, Australia, and Canada, particularly in sectors like construction, retail, hospitality, and tourism. Businesses choose the platform to navigate complex HR legislation, like Australia’s Fair Work Act, which regulates contract terms. MyHR’s solution also helps customers save time when hiring and improves employee retention through better deployment programs. “We’ve seen businesses become more focused on supporting their employees, recognizing them as a vital resource,” says Peter Simmons, chief technology officer at MyHR.

To support its growth, MyHR needed a cloud platform that was both highly scalable and reliable. Additionally, data security had to be robust enough to meet government regulations in each market and fulfill customer expectations. While security wasn’t an issue, the scalability of the legacy hosted infrastructure behind the MyHR platform posed challenges. The IT team spent time managing routine scaling tasks that could have been better directed toward innovation. Simmons also saw the limitations of the legacy platform in adopting future technologies like AI. “We had ambitious plans in areas including automation, data handling, disaster recovery, and AI, but our previous setup lacked the services to make those a reality,” says Simmons.

Noting the cloud scalability of AWS and its compliance with data regulations in MyHR’s key markets, Simmons decided to migrate the platform infrastructure to AWS. “We saw that using AWS gave customers confidence in our technology's performance and the security of their data,” he recalls. “Mentioning AWS in our RFPs checked a lot of boxes.” MyHR also partnered with Lancom Technology, an AWS Partner, to manage infrastructure migration and ongoing platform development. “Lancom understood our technical challenges and offered a clear plan for migration and platform modernization,” says Simmons.

For the migration to AWS, MyHR used Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances to run applications. Early challenges, such as issues with a server replication tool, were resolved with Lancom’s support, helping MyHR shift to a bare metal build process. To protect customer data, MyHR implemented AWS Control Tower and single sign-on (SSO) to manage its multi-account AWS environments. It also transitioned from self-hosted databases to Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) and outsourced database management to Lancom, reducing the administrative workload.

After completing the migration, MyHR began optimizing its AWS infrastructure, a process that continues today. Early on, MyHR switched from Puppet to AWS infrastructure-as-code tools like Amazon CloudFormation to improve efficiency. The company also adopted microservices using AWS Fargate to run and scale containerized workloads, giving its IT team space to focus on development. Thanks to these modernization efforts, MyHR has reduced task completion times—which include preparing employee documents and responding to HR queries—from days to minutes. The performance and reliability of its cloud-native services have reduced the already small number of issues by 11 percent.

With its platform running on modernized AWS infrastructure, MyHR is experiencing sustainable growth across its markets. The platform now supports approximately 37,000 employees, reflecting a rise of 87 percent since migrating to AWS—and this number continues to grow as more SMEs come on board. “AWS gives us the scalability and reliability to maintain our current growth rate of 22 percent without escalating costs,” says Simmons. Additionally, end users are pleased with the platform’s strong performance, contributing to MyHR’s impressive customer retention rate of 96 percent.

In addition, the modernized approach has reduced the management workload on IT staff, freeing them to drive innovation. “Adopting cloud-native AWS services gives us time to experiment that we never had before,” states Simmons. This has led to developing a data platform that organizes its data lake using a medallion architecture design. The design, featuring raw, processed, and curated data layers, uses Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for storage and Amazon Athena for querying data. By efficiently processing large volumes of data, the platform will help MyHR automate and optimize customer HR processes.

With more time to experiment, MyHR has started working with Amazon Bedrock to explore the use of generative AI models in a secure and compliant way. Generative AI is becoming a key component in HR SaaS platforms globally, assisting in tasks from creating job descriptions and drafting candidate communications to supporting employee training and development. MyHR plans to gradually integrate these capabilities. “The time saved through modernization has given us the opportunity to develop next-generation services that increase customer value,” says Simmons.