Creatomatic have been building digital for their clients since 2012. In that time, their client base has grown to include businesses all over the world. In 2024, they reached out to Beaty Consultancy to see if we could help them offer even more resilient, reliable and secure hosting solutions to their clients. Of course we jumped at the opportunity!
Creatomatic already had a phenomenal base on which to build. Their servers were not under tremendous load, and so performance for the end user remained top-tier. They were keen to keep this well-deserved, and hard-won, reputation for performance and reliability, whilst also incrementally improving their security posture in an increasingly hostile digital environment.
Security best practices
The Beaty Consultancy team met with Creatomatic’s management team, and agreed a backlog of tasks which would move their platform towards a much stricter security posture, and one which would drastically reduce the likelihood of brute force attacks, credential stuffing attacks, and “confused deputy” issues.
Clearly it wouldn’t be appropriate to smash such configuration changes straight on to the production servers, so the first job for the Beaty Consultancy team was to stand up a replica of the Creatomatic environment, and make the changes there. Creatomatic’s leadership team were able to leave the Beaty Consultancy team to work directly with their development lead in order to validate and smoke-test the new configuration. When everything was fully tested and validated, the Beaty Consultancy team organised a phased rollout of the new configuration across the existing Creatomatic production estate.
Disaster Recovery
Another priority for the Creatomatic leadership team was around failure preparation within their hosting partner’s environment, and they were keen to ensure their systems would be fully effective in a worst case scenario.. A disaster recovery (DR) test was the logical next step, and AWS being at the core of everything we do here at Beaty Consultancy, was agreed as the destination for the DR server.
We used the work we had already done to close the Creatomatic hosting environment in order to test new security configurations, and repurposed those infrastructure scripts to stand up a Disaster Recovery server.
This kind of DR is known as “pilot light” disaster recovery. We constantly sync data to the DR, and we have scripts ready to go which will bring up the necessary server infrastructure to host client websites within agreed Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs). But importantly, when DR is not in use, there are no servers humming away, costing money, and contributing to CO2 output.
A helping hand during Business as Usual
Possibly the most rewarding work that Beaty Consultancy delivers to Creatomatic is the support when times are good. Helping the development team to focus on development, whilst we get on in the background, keeping the lights on, and keeping the bad guys out, is really rewarding. We love being a part of the Creatomatic story, and playing a small part in them delivering incredible digital experiences to their clients.
