IDenteq is one of our oldest and most valuable clients. They genuinely care about the security and reliability of the data-driven solutions they deliver for their utilities clients all over the UK. Beaty Consultancy is delighted to be their cloud technology partners supporting them as they expand their service offerings, and when IDenteq took over support and hosting for the Landlord TAP portal, we knew we had another opportunity to show off!
The Challenge
Landlord TAP is a completely bespoke web application which helps UK landlords report tenant information to water companies, and has been available for the past decade. However systems built back in 2015 weren’t always architected with cloud-first technologies in mind, and so a migration into IDenteq’s AWS environment had a couple of opportunities for improvement.
IDenteq have always embraced Platform as a Service (PaaS) technology, so they have a minimal need for support of their systems already in production. We didn’t want Landlord TAP to be the exception which needed, as we say in the trade, fed and watered, every day. Good cloud environments should be robust, and able to run for long periods with minimal input from DevOps.
Decouple, but don’t break anything!
We used AWS Directory Service, which is a managed Active Directory service, to be able to decouple the application services from the back-end database services, whilst still enabling the authentication methods the app relies on. The goal was to modernise the app with cloud-native PaaS technologies – without creating a six-month backlog for the development team.
Next, we used good old AWS Relational Database Services (RDS) to host a managed SQL Server database, attached to the Active Directory domain. The beauty of a managed database is that AWS handle backups and minor version upgrades during a maintenance window we choose. They also handle availability if one of Amazon’s data centres goes down for whatever reason.
Logs and Management
IDenteq are really looking forward to bringing lots of improvements to the Landlord TAP experience, whilst maintaining the reliability of the current platform. Changes will be rolled out, first into pre-production environments, and later into the user-facing production application, so we need robust logs so we can piece together actions.
To that end, we decouple the HTTPS transport and routing from the application by using AWS Application Load Balancers, which automatically renew TLS certificates (keeping everyone’s connection to the application secure) as well as robust logging of every request processed. Application logs are collected using CloudWatch Agent, which together gives a single screen for admins and devs to check when investigating problems.
We also use AWS Systems Manager (SSM) to manage access to, and compliance of, our servers. Systems Manager gives us an inventory of all servers in the estate, so we can remediate any software vulnerabilities discovered in the wild. SSM also allows us to apply patch baselines to our servers, which means we can decide which patches we want to apply to which environment during which maintenance window – we have complete control. Best of all, the actions are logged in CloudTrail, and raise alarms if there are any problems.
All Systems Go!
It sounds super simple when it’s written down, right? Of course, there are myriad technologies and products used in addition to what I’ve mentioned here, but the bottom line is, it works! IDeneteq has been hosting the Landlord TAP since the beginning of March 2025, and things are going well.
They do plan to make big changes to modernise the system, but for the time being, Beaty Consultancy helped them take a monolithic application, and deploy it using cloud-first technologies, meaning their support team doesn’t need to sweat it, and the users of the web application don’t know any different (apart from a bit of a speed increase). That’s what we like to see!
