According to Ken Research, in 2019, the Edtech market in Vietnam was worth $2 billion with an expected compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 23.4% in the period of 2019 - 2023. On the other hand, Vietnam is also becoming a potential market for Edtech startups when it was named in the top 10 countries with the fastest growth in E-learning in 2019 (44.3%).
In light of that, more and more Edtech business models are born to meet the ever-changing needs of schools, parents and students. Apart from some popular Edtech models such as education management systems, school management softwares or online course providers, the idea of school review systems has also been realized by some Vietnam startups, one of which is KiddiHub. Understanding the anxiety that parents have to bear when looking for kindergartens - an important phase in their children's long-term education, KiddiHub was born to help Parents choose a desired school among thousands of different options.
Like most of the Edtech companies, KiddiHub chooses the cloud computing environment to build its kindergarten review platform, in order to benefit from the flexibility, security and reliability. Strategic partner of KiddiHub from the very first days is Amazon Web Services (AWS) - one of the leading cloud computing providers in the world. Thanks to the system building on the stable cloud environment of AWS, the KiddiHub platform rarely encounters system failures and seamlessly operates during peak times (from June to September), when parents begin to actively search and evaluate a majority of kindergarten for their kids.
Detecting implicit risks under the IT system of KiddiHub
However, after having their entire system reassessed by OSAM - advanced partner of AWS, the management team of KiddiHub detected some critical gaps, leading to the potential risks of the current system.
First of all, KiddiHub did not have a system for automatic monitoring and alerting of important indicators of the user experience, or notification of the health of the system over the time. This is a major shortcoming for a technology platform like KiddiHub, where the user experience must always be closely monitored, innovated and improved every second. A slight delay in detection and troubleshooting can also seriously damage the parent's experience and KiddiHub's business reputation.
Secondly, the KiddiHub system has not applied encryption mechanisms for important data in S3 or Elastic Block Storage, and has not integrated the ability to rotate, manage and retrieve basic credentials, data, API keys, and other secrets. As a school review platform, KiddiHub needs to store and manage a huge amount of data, including school information, personal information of users. These are all sensitive information that need to be strictly secured, so the absence of a strict security mechanism will significantly affect the operation of KiddiHub later.
Finally, another key factor that KiddiHub needs to keep in mind is the cost of using AWS. Although AWS constantly gives advice to users to optimize costs, over-budgeting costs for infrastructure is highly possible because KiddiHub does not have a warning system when extraordinary charges occur. Therefore, it is often too late when system engineers realize the problem and try to fix it.
Harvest the success thanks to AWS Well-Architected Framework
By applying Well-Architected Framework of AWS, solution architects from OSAM have advised KiddiHub best practices for using AWS services, as well as helped KiddiHub install and integrate essential services for their school review system. Thanks to that, the performance, security and cost related problems have been completely solved. Specifically, after joining in the Well-architected program, KiddiHub's System has reached the highest standard of security on the AWS cloud, which thoroughly prevents attacks from inside and outside of the organization. Apart from that, KiddiHub is also able to optimize costs by using tags to allocate costs for different workloads of the system, so that they can easily track and receive automatic notifications when unexpected costs arise. Finally, integrated monitoring and alerting services have helped KiddiHub's engineers quickly detect problems and promptly handle them, ensuring that the system operates stably even when the business expands.
Conclusion
With a business model that requires such a high level of security and availability of systems like Edtech, it is of importance to regularly check and evaluate the "health" of the IT system. The advice for Edtech startups that have their IT infrastructure running on the cloud, the best advice is to consult with cloud computing experts who are capable of deploying and optimizing this technology. As an Advanced Partner of AWS, especially in the public sector, OSAM can assist businesses in the Edtech field to review the current situation and propose the most suitable plan to optimize the current resources. Contact OSAM now for a free consultation, in order to leverage your Edtech business on the cloud of AWS!