Eramba’s Cloud Journey to SaaS

Client

Eramba

Eramba approached us to help them move their GRC solution to a cloud-based SaaS offering on AWS. Like many organizations, they were facing a challenge with their old legacy software, realizing they don’t have the capacity to innovate on their own. Our main goal was to enable Eramba’s ability to scale their solution more efficiently and turn it into a multi-tenant solution.

The Client

Eramba is a company that offers a risk management software solution, known as GRC (Governance, Risk, and Compliance). A solution for teams to run compliance (ISO, NIST, SOCx, Etc), risk, incident, project, exception, policy, and control management, among other things. With over a decade of history, this simple, affordable, open software used by organizations around the world has become a very popular GRC option.

Challenge

As with any other migration, we faced a number of challenges at once. Firstly, there was the need to make as few changes as possible to Eramba’s existing application codebase, the old legacy software. This was important because their team wasn’t equipped to handle major changes to the codebase and didn’t have the capacity to innovate on their own, since they had no internal DevOps engineers at hand.

Another issue on the table was the inability of their software to scale fast enough, as they could only onboard a limited number of tenants per month due to the tedious onboarding process. So, how did we tackle this?

Tech Stack

AWS EKS, Aurora, ElastiCache, WAF
Crossplane, ArgoCD, Terraform, Helm
Grafana, Prometheus,Thanos, Loki

What We Did

We were able to introduce custom automation using Crossplane to help with tenant onboarding, which allowed us to make the necessary changes to the application and streamlining their onboarding process without overwhelming Eramba’s team. The entire process from initial assessment, architecture rework and transformation took 7 months.

SaaSification Process

1.STEP

How we started [assessment]

To help Eramba with this transition, we first conducted an assessment of their current solution and determined the best approach for migrating it to AWS.

LARA [reference architecture]

Once we completed the assessment, we utilized our reference architecture called LARA to quickly and efficiently migrate Eramba’s GRC application to AWS. We used a variety of AWS solutions as part of the migration, including EKS, Aurora, SES, S3, and WAF. We also used Kubernetes to help manage the deployment and scaling of Eramba’s GRC application. LARA allows us to quickly and efficiently deploy a complex infrastructure with all of the necessary services according to the client’s needs.

Efficiency [distributed environment]

To make the whole solution efficient, we designed the environment to be dynamic and distributed. We utilized Kubernetes with a feature-rich addon ecosystem to automate the whole process of tenant on-boarding and scale the environment.

In addition to the core migration to AWS, we also introduced a new observability stack using Grafana. This allowed Eramba to monitor the performance of their GRC application in real-time and make necessary adjustments to ensure it was running smoothly in a distributed environment.

Finish [transfer]

Once the migration was complete, we transferred ownership of the GRC application to Eramba. They are now able to manage their own GRC solution on AWS, and have the added benefits of scalability and multi-tenancy.

Outcomes

By moving their GRC solution to a SaaS offering on AWS, Eramba has been able to expand their customer base and improve the scalability of their business. From initially only being able to onboard limited number of tenants per month, Eramba is currently onboarding 5 tenants per month automatically, ready for hundreds more. Current time to measure a new tenant setup is 3 minutes. The custom automation we introduced has made it easier for them to manage their application, and the new observability stack has given them greater visibility into its performance.

By utilizing our LARA reference architecture and other AWS solutions, we were able to help them migrate their GRC solution to AWS in a way that was seamless and efficient and with zero downtime. This allows Eramba to manage all resources efficiently and scale faster to meet a rapidly growing customer base.

Esteban Ribičić

Founder & Project Leader

Eramba

One thing I learnt in this past decade is that having good people makes doing business a lot easier. Thanks Labyrinth Labs!

Future Steps [ life-long support ]

With our ongoing cooperation with Eramba, we keep improving the platform and incorporating the infrastructure changes that are being introduced by the constant development of the application itself. Ensuring the infrastructure scales smoothly to support their upward business trajectory. We are confident that Eramba will continue to be successful in the years ahead, and we look forward to supporting them.