 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards brought to you by Amazon Web Services. Hi, and welcome back. I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's coverage of Amazon Web Services Public Sector Awards for their partners. Really interesting when you get to talk to people around the globe, when we talk to the vendors, the award winners, as well as their customers who have some interesting projects. So, happy to welcome to the program, coming to us from Argentina. I have Leo Bracco. He is the Latin American Executive Director for Cloud Heasive, and joining him, his customer, Carolina Chintian. She is the Director of the Political Institution Program at CPAC. CPAC, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. Thank you for having us. All right, so Leo, first of all, let's start with you if we could. So, Cloud Heasive, first of all, congratulations. You were the non-profit sector award winner for cybersecurity solutions. Of course, anybody that knows public sector, it's, there's the government agencies, there's non-profits, there's education. Cyber security, of course, went from the top priority to the top, top priority here in 2020. So, if you could just give us a snapshot of Cloud Heasive for our customer. Well, Cloud Heasive is a US-based company established six years ago in 2014. And we decided a couple of years ago to move to Latin America and to start working with Latin America customers. Our offices are in Argentina right now. And one of the focus that we have in the solutions that we give to our customers is security. We work on services to help companies to reduce the cost, increase productively, and watch the security posture. So we've been working a long time ago with many NPOs and seeing how they can leverage the solutions and how they can give secure, how to be secure in the world, right? And the internet. All right, Caroline, if you could tell us a little bit about the CPAC and maybe then, you know, tee us up as the project that you're working on. Okay, thank you. So CPAC is a non-profit, a think tank, non-profit organization, independent organization that aims to deliver better public policies in different areas, in economic development, in social protection, and state and government. My particular program, the political institutions program goal is, or the mission is basically to promote evidence-based decisions to improve democratic processes and to guarantee civil and political rights across all the country. So we work on issues such as improving election administrations, legislative work, representation, and that's our area of work. Wonderful, sounds like a phenomenal project. Leo, if you could, help us understand what, you know, where did cloud adhesive get involved in this project? Was there existing relationship already? Or is it for specific rollout that tells us about, obviously the security angles are a big piece? No, we didn't have a previous engagement with them. They come to us with a very short time to elections and they need a secure solution. So we first have to analyze the actual solution, how it works, the knowledge involved, the current infra that they have. Then we have to understand the challenge that they're facing. They have a very public side, they need to go public, and they need to be very secure. And the last, we have to develop a fast migration strategy. We knew that AWS was the perfect fit for the need. So we just have to align a good strategy with the customer need. And all this has been done in less than 72 hours that there was our deadline to elections. Wow, talk about fast. Carolina, help us understand a little bit. Had your organization, had you been using cloud before? 72 hours is definitely an aggressive timeline. So help us understand a little bit as to what went into making your decision and obviously 72 hours, super tight timeframe. Super, super short, yeah, that was a big challenge. So let me tell you more about what we do and the context. So Argentina holds elections, national elections every two years. In each election year, CPEX tries to generate and systematize analysis of provincial and national elections with the goal of informing key actors in the electoral processes. This is decision makers, political parties, media and general population. So as our first experience in 2017 with the informed voter project, we had this collaboration with the national electoral authorities in which we created a landing page in our website where you could find as a voter all of the information you need to go and cast your vote throughout the entire election process, meaning from the campaign stage, election administration details, polling places, electoral offer, participation, et cetera. So that was a landing page hosted in our website. And in 2017, we managed to have a button in every eligible voter in Argentina, Facebook feed. So you could go click there and go to our website, right? And have all of the information summarized and even in a very simple way, straightforward way. So what happened in the 2017 election day is that the button was so successful that the landing page made our server to collapse in the first hours of the election day. So we learned a huge lesson there, which was that we had to be prepared in 2019 if we wanted to repeat this experience. And that is how we get to Lord Hesse. Wonderful, Leo, if you could help us understand a little bit architecturally, what's going on there? What was cohesive doing? What AWS services were leveraged? Perfect. Well, we need reliability, performance, scability, of course, and the main thing, security. So we have no doubt about the cloud and all the differentials of AWS. So our main question was about how do we align the right services to give the best solution to the customer? So we did kind of strategy with S3, CloudFront, and we, at the same time, been monitoring everything with CloudTrail and securing the public's access to all of this information. So that gave us a perfect fit for the solution, a very easy solution and very, of course, scalable, but more than anything, we could improve the customer experience in very, very small amount of time. So this is a very simple solution that fits perfect for the customer. Wonderful, Carolina, if you could, tell us, how did things go? What lessons have you learned, anything along the way that you would give feedback to your peers or other organizations that were looking to do something similar? Yeah, well, the 2017 experience was a very tough experience for us because we've been preparing for election day during the 2016 and 2017, and the infrastructure was the limit we had in that point. So we couldn't afford, we have a commitment with informing voters and informing key actors on election process and these key actors are expecting that information on election day before and after. So the lesson there is, we cannot be limited by the infrastructure. So assuming that in 2019 that the landing page would receive a similar amount or a huge amount of traffic volume visits on the election day, basically we knew that traditional hosting service had known, couldn't fulfill those needs. So we had to go beyond traditional and the partner was critical to help us to the migration to the cloud. Yeah, Leo, maybe you could speak a little bit to that scalability and of course, nonprofits very sensitive to costs involved in these solutions. So help us understand those underpinnings of leveraging AWS specifically in cloud adhesive, how this meets their needs and still is financially makes sense. Perfect. When you have these kind of solutions, of course your first concern is, okay, how do I make a scalable solution that fits on the, just on this moment that they need the behavior for so many infrastructure involved and then at the other day, they need no infra at all. But you have another two big things that you have to focus on, one is the security. You need to monitor all the behavior of the content and paying attention to any external menace. You have one 24 hour day, so you need to be very responsibility and high sensitive information that the customer has on the set of data there. It's a good to say that we have no security incidents and no security breach during the most public stage of the project. So that was very good for us. The next thing is from the delivery perspective. So you have a potential pick of people over the side to you should manage the content delivery network to answer all the requirements. You must be able to cash out the contents in cloud friends so you have and you can achieve your goals, right? And what I can say is about numbers we achieve more than 99.5 efficiency he'd rate you over the CDN that's over cloud front. And we kept server CPU usage below 10% all the time. So this was a major success for us. We have no trouble. We use things at the most and most of anything the customer has the security, everything looked off from our perspective. Leo, one follow-up if I could, we've looked at 2020 being able to scale and respond to the changes in workload and be able to stay secure when, you know, bad actors, many people are working at home but doesn't mean the bad actors aren't out there. We've actually seen an increase in security attacks. So just do you have any commentary overall about what's happening more recently and what you see in your space? Yeah, well, we are very focused right now and our security is being each time bigger, right? One of the biggest minister security is our own team because we have to keep our teams out of line to the process and understanding the security as a first step doing things well from the network perspective. Then we have a very good experience over this last two years with all the security tools that AWS is seeking to the market. So we now have CloudTrail, we can do many things with WAF, we are working towards of new good security solutions. Okay, so I think this will be the future. We have to focus ourself in these two pillars, the first pillar is okay, what we can do on our own network and the other pillars, all the tools that AWS is giving us so we can manage security from a new perspective. Caroline, last question that I have for you is, look forward a little bit if you will, are there things that you'll be looking to do in future election cycles or anything else from this project that you could expect going forward? Yeah, definitely we're gonna repeat this experience in 2021, so I'm trying to think of the success was the 2019 election cycle and in this particular informed voter project, we might wanna keep doing this for next election cycles, not only 2020 but for the future. All right, and Leo, last piece for you, first of all congratulations again, winning best cybersecurity solution for nonprofit, just talk a little bit if you would about your partnership with AWS and specifically the requirements and what you see in the nonprofit sector. Well, we see that the nonprofit are growing lots so they will need very good scalable solutions. We see that all the focus that we have in on security is the next need because we have been working on this towards to the future, the solutions kept growing each time the networks are growing, each time the profit is growing. So the focus on the security will be one of the appendix of our work in the future and I think that's the biggest issues that we are gonna have, okay? Having good engineers, good hard work and manage the challenges and consolidate all the solutions as a need. Right now we're working on many projects with different NGOs and we're working towards that they have the solution that fits them and of course we try to keep in all the public sector we try to keep the cost at the range level that we can afford our customers can afford. All right, that's a big problem that we're having. Well, Carolina, congratulations on the progress with your project. Thank you so much for joining us and Leo, thank you again for joining us and congratulations to you and the cloud as a team for winning the award. Thanks. Very much. All right, and stay tuned for more coverage. It's a cube at the AWS Public Sector Partner Awards. I'm Stu Miniman, thanks for watching.