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Thinknum Gains Valuable Benefits Through the Amazon Web Services Foundational Technical Review
By Omar Faruk, Partner Solutions Architect – Amazon Web Services
By Phil Varghese, Partner Solutions Architect – Amazon Web Services
By Boris Spiwak, Chief Operating Officer – Thinknum
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| Thinknum |
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Thinknum’s customers leverage this data via an a API or user interface (UI) built on a foundation powered by Amazon Web Services (Amazon Web Services) to act upon business opportunities in real time.
Thinknum, an
In addition to unlocking these programmatic benefits, Thinknum leveraged the FTR to identify key opportunities for improvement in its Amazon Web Services account configuration and receive guidance on how to implement improvements to its security, reliability, and operational posture.
In this post, we will explore Thinknum’s experience completing an FTR, and how it helped bring awareness of best practices to mitigate risks, improve its solution, and gain access to valuable Amazon Web Services Partner benefits.
Improving Business Outcomes with the FTR
The FTR defines a set of foundational best practices based on the
The review addresses sensitive data management and regulatory compliance, as well as business continuity and disaster recovery planning to help maintain customer trust and avoid downtime and revenue loss. The FTR can help Amazon Web Services Partners demonstrate the efficacy of their solution by ensuring basic security controls are applied and processes to support security incidents are in place.
As part of the process, partners are provided an FTR checklist that lists out solution requirements. Partners then conduct a self-assessment and submit a report detailing their solution status compared to the requirements. After you begin your FTR, you will periodically review your solution architecture and operations to identify any gaps or areas for improvement.
Upon successful completion of the FTR (marked by an “Approved” state in Amazon Web Services Partner Central), a partner is considered to be a “Validated” member of the APN. At the “Validated” stage, partners have access to additional APN programs like
The “Validated” stage also qualifies Amazon Web Services Partners for multiple APN benefits, including a “Reviewed by Amazon Web Services” badge, listings in
Enhancing Security Enforcement and Improving Reliability
The FTR process helped Thinknum gain valuable insights to help improve its identity management and security posture.
Before conducting the FTR, Thinknum had its identities locally residing in
By linking
In addition, Thinknum had previously stored logs separately in each of its Amazon Web Services accounts, which posed a security risk and made it difficult for the team to investigate infrastructure issues and identify misbehavior. This also meant the operational team was not able to analyze and display logs in a single dashboard.
By centralizing log storage to an administrative account, Thinknum’s operational team is able to more securely and efficiently collect, analyze, and display
Thinknum also lacked an automatic backup strategy and related recovery point and time objectives for data stored on Amazon Web Services. This identified gaps in its ability to recover from incidents like system failures and data loss.
Based on recommendations from the FTR checklist, Thinknum adopted a new strategic data backup and recovery plan using a solution from Amazon Web Services Partner
Guidance from an Amazon Web Services Partner Solutions Architect, provided as part of the FTR, allowed Thinknum to not only simplify its management processes and better secure its resources, but also to integrate their offering with clients through cross-account Amazon Web Services IAM roles. This allowed Thinknum to reduce the amount of sensitive information stored for their customers and provide more secure access to Amazon Web Services resources.
As a result of updates made through the FTR, Thinknum is able to mitigate risks and increase customer successes and trust by avoiding downtime and related revenue loss.
“Amazon Web Services has been Thinknum’s trusted partner since our earliest days as a startup,” says Gregory Ugwi, Chief Executive Officer at Thinknum. “The FTR process helped us strengthen our security posture in concrete ways that our clients appreciate, and I sincerely recommend it to other tech companies.”
Simplifying Compliance Management
The FTR helped Thinknum achieve its compliance goals by recommending the latest security and operational processes. The requirements of the FTR mirror those found in many security policies, such as ISO27001, which Thinknum was able to implement with ease due to the foundation laid via FTR.
Nine of America’s top 10 investment banks, as well as many hedge funds, growth and private equity firms, pension funds, and other asset management firms around the world
Many of these financial institutions require strict adherence to regulatory and security practices, and often perform audits on their vendors to enforce them. Process changes made as a result of the FTR have put Thinknum in a position where it can confidently pass these audits.
One other important result of the FTR process for Thinknum is a change in company culture that prioritizes proper technical processes. Thinknum now conducts yearly architecture reviews to help build more secure, high-performing, resilient, and efficient infrastructures for applications and workloads.
Conclusion
In this post, we explained how Amazon Web Services Partner Thinknum improved its identity management, security posture and operational posture by addressing foundational best practices via FTR.
By undergoing a Foundational Technical Review (FTR), Amazon Web Services Partners can gain valuable technical and business benefits by addressing important requirements and managing ongoing compliance. Some partners also realize secondary benefits like development of a security-first culture, streamlined business continuity planning processes, and human resources offboarding.
Once you have registered as an Amazon Web Services Partner via Partner Central, you can request an FTR by joining the Software Path and following the steps in the
For more information about the FTR process or other partner benefits, reach out to your Partner Development team contact. If you do not have a Partner Development team representative,
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Thinknum – Amazon Web Services Partner Spotlight
Thinknum is an Amazon Web Services Partner with a leading web data platform that indexes the public web to create structured datasets used by customers to track job listings, employee sentiments, store locations, and more.