How Amos ensures secure, scalable, and trusted digital infrastructure for Higher Education!
Introduction
Higher Education institutions face unique security and scalability challenges. Peaks in usage during registration, exams, or results release strain IT infrastructure. At the same time, data protection regulations demand strict governance, transparency, and resilience. Amos was built from the ground up to address these challenges. By combining a secure-by-design architecture, scalable cloud-native services, and robust internal processes, Amos delivers a platform that universities can trust to run mission-critical operations.
Secure Architecture on AWS
Amos V4 is hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS), leveraging industry-standard managed services to ensure reliability, performance, and compliance.
Key components include:
- CloudFront: Distributes both static and dynamic content globally with low latency, while adding automatic DDoS protection backed by AWS Shield Standard and caching.
- API Gateway: Provides a secure, scalable entry point for all APIs, with throttling, OAuth 2.0, and protocol translation built in.
- Cognito: Manages secure logins with MFA, integrates with enterprise IdPs (e.g., Azure AD, EntraID), and ensures strong OAuth 2.0-based API access.
- RDS: Delivers ACID-compliant data storage with automatic backups, failover, and dedicated VPC isolation.
- Elastic Beanstalk & Lambda: Elastic Beanstalk manages containerised workloads, while AWS Lambda powers serverless execution with automatic scaling.
- CloudWatch & WAF: Centralised monitoring, alerting, and protection against common exploits such as SQL injection or XSS.
- Dedicated VPCs: Each client is isolated in its own VPC, ensuring no cross-tenant data movement and simplifying compliance.
By default, Amos provisions live environments in AWS Dublin (EU-West-1) with disaster recovery in AWS Frankfurt (EU-Central-1). However, data residency is fully configurable — institutions can select preferred AWS regions globally to meet local compliance, regulatory, or strategic requirements.
Amos is designed with a cloud-agnostic architecture and can be deployed to Azure or Google Cloud on request, though AWS remains the primary supported platform.
Designed for Higher Ed Peaks & Troughs
Higher Education workloads are highly seasonal. Amos’s cloud-native foundation ensures seamless performance during spikes:
- Compute Scalability: AWS Lambda scales automatically to handle from 10 to 10,000+ concurrent requests.
- API Request Handling: API Gateway processes millions of requests per second, distributing load across availability zones.
- Frontend Delivery: Static assets served via S3 + CloudFront respond instantly worldwide, even under burst traffic.
- Database Scaling: RDS supports vertical scaling and horizontal read replicas to handle heavy workloads.
- Elastic Services: Elastic Beanstalk scales background tasks based on load.
Outcome: Amos scales up automatically during exam registration weeks and scales down during quiet periods — ensuring both performance and cost efficiency.
Internal Security Processes
Security at Amos goes beyond technology. Our internal processes ensure ongoing protection and resilience:
- Secure SDLC: Code is reviewed, dependencies scanned, and security testing performed at every stage.
- CI/CD Pipelines: Automated deployments reduce human error and enforce consistency.
- Access Controls: MFA enforced for all Amos personnel; client environments remain isolated.
- Audit & Monitoring: CloudWatch integrates with the Amos app for detailed log visibility.
- Release Management: Major releases are deployed 3–4 times a year, with hotfixes delivered rapidly when needed.
Penetration Testing & Assurance
To provide confidence, Amos undergoes regular third-party penetration testing across application, infrastructure, and APIs.
- Findings are remediated swiftly, with retesting to validate fixes.
- Tests cover OWASP Top 10, API exploits, and infrastructure vulnerabilities.
Amos practices and controls are designed to support compliance with GDPR, ISO 27001, HIPAA, and similar frameworks.
Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity
Amos is resilient to outages and failures, including regional AWS issues:
- By default, Amos deploys live environments in AWS Dublin with disaster recovery in AWS Frankfurt. If required, institutions can choose alternative primary and failover regions globally to meet specific compliance or operational requirements.
- Backups: Source code, AMIs, and RDS snapshots are backed up securely to S3.
- IaC: Terraform scripts enable rapid infrastructure recovery.
Data Protection & Compliance
Amos ensures client control over data retention policies. Each institution defines how long data is stored, with encryption options (AWS KMS for RDS, S3 server-side encryption).
Key principles:
- No multi-tenancy — every client has a fully isolated environment.
- All data in transit is encrypted (TLS 1.2+, with support for TLS 1.3 where available).
- APIs are OAuth 2.0-only, with IP whitelisting supported for additional security.
- No client data is stored on end-user devices.
This approach simplifies compliance with GDPR, HIPAA, and ISO 27001 by ensuring clean, tenant-specific audit trails.
Conclusion
Amos was designed for security, scalability, and trust in Higher Education. With its secure AWS-native architecture, proven scalability during academic peaks, rigorous internal processes, and ongoing penetration testing, Amos enables universities to operate with confidence.
Learn more about how Amos protects mission-critical student and academic operations. Contact us today for a full security briefing.
Contact: hello@amos.com
