Noggin Speeds Up and Simplifies Crisis Management on AWS

Enterprises today face potentially damaging problems such as natural disasters, security breaches, or other emergencies. In a recent survey by PwC, 95 percent of business leaders believed a crisis was imminent within the next two years. Noggin helps its customers manage business disruption through its end-to-end safety, security, and critical event management software platform.

 

“The Noggin platform provides an all-hazards approach to safety and security management,” says James Boddam-Whetham, chief executive officer of Noggin. “The solution houses all the tools required to make informed decisions and respond effectively to any incident.” The company’s integrated safety and security platform gives diverse global organizations and agencies—such as the American Red Cross, Sydney Opera House, Halifax Port Authority, LINX Cargo Care Group, Caterpillar, University of Technology Sydney, and Scotia Gas Networks—a way to improve emergency management, work safety, crisis management, and business continuity, even across borders. Noggin also serves customers in a broad array of industries, including government, financial services, humanitarian, education, healthcare, transportation and logistics, utilities, and more.

For several years, Noggin worked with various cloud and on-premises hosting companies, which limited the company’s ability to scale to support clients globally. “Many of our customers work in emergency and disaster crisis management, where redundancy and scalability are important,” says Boddam-Whetham. “To support those operations, we had to scale up environments in different regions, which was a manual and time-consuming process.”

 

Noggin also sought to enhance its security capabilities to meet its customers’ compliance requirements. “We manage classified data for government agencies and having the appropriate compliances in place, such as AWS SOC 1 and SOC 2 among others, is important to our customers,” says Charlie Forsyth, chief product officer at Noggin.

The business decided to migrate its application environment to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud in 2019. “Moving to AWS was an easy decision for us because we could expand into different markets with AWS Global Cloud Infrastructure, while fulfilling our customers’ security requirements,” Boddam-Whetham says.

 

Noggin launched the Noggin 2.0 platform on the AWS Cloud, with Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances and AWS Lambda. The updated platform uses Amazon DynamoDB as its primary data storage for customer data, and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for file storage. “Noggin 2.0 is extremely configurable and allows our customers to carry out heavy processing on large data volumes,” says Owen Prime, chief technology officer at Noggin. “The platform scales on demand, without the need for engineering intervention.”

When it comes to emergency disaster and crisis management, there are often situations where customers need to scale quickly without notice. With AWS, Noggin can expand its compute capacity on demand when its customers need to quickly respond to rapid spikes in traffic during a crisis.

 

For example, during a hurricane in the US in 2021, the American Red Cross needed to scale Noggin’s platform significantly to support thousands of new users on its site requiring information and resources. “Previously, we didn’t have auto scaling capabilities. Moving to AWS means we can scale all of our application layers on demand to support significant traffic spikes,” says Forsyth.

 

Other Noggin customers have also benefited from the platform’s scalability. Upon successfully implementing Noggin 2.0 at Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Nick van Pooss, manager of Security and Emergency Management at QUT, said that the new system is “a 100 percent improvement over what we had.”

To meet its customers’ security requirements, Noggin leverages built-in AWS security features such as AWS Key Management Service (KMS) for encryption. The business has achieved ISO 27001 and IRAP compliance, which according to Prime, instills customer confidence in the platform’s security.

 

Forsyth adds, “AWS helps us build trust, particularly with organizations that might be new to the cloud. These customers know they can rely on the certifications and controls that we’ve built into our platform with the help of AWS.”

Previously, Noggin’s engineering team spent much of its time scaling the platform and managing redundancy and failover. As a result, the company was limited in its ability to innovate. Now, engineers can focus on building new features instead of managing the IT stack. “We’re adding to our core products every day and have built a modern user interface with a more responsive front end and a drag-and-drop workflow, making configuration easier for our customers,” says Forsyth.

 

Noggin is also driving global expansion, moving into new markets in Canada and Europe. “We’ve launched multilingual products in 2021 and we’re also starting to expand in Southeast Asia,” says Forsyth. “Being able to tap into the global presence of AWS means we can reasonably and quickly expand into new markets and offer data sovereignty in a way that we couldn’t previously.”

 

Looking ahead, Noggin aims to expand its use of AWS services to support machine learning, artificial intelligence, and natural language processing initiatives. The business plans to apply newer AWS technologies to its solutions so it can help its customers solve crises faster and more efficiently. This ultimately helps its customers make businesses and communities safer and more secure.

 

“Aside from rounding out our technology platform, AWS also works closely as a great commercial partner—providing a technical review of Noggin’s systems through its foundational technical review process and getting us into a position to grow our business through the AWS Marketplace” adds Forsyth.