The Mortgage Trail
AWS Success Story
AWS Success Story: The Mortgage Trail
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Background
Incorporated in 2013, The Mortgage Trail, an independent mortgage brokerage based in Toronto, Canada, assists its customers with residential mortgages and financing options. The Mortgage Trail has helped clients with hundreds of millions of dollars in mortgage financing, focusing on the long-term needs of clients rather than one-off transactions.
At the heart of the business is a web-based application, The Mortgage Map, which connects mortgage applicants with mortgage brokers who guide the applicants on their journey to mortgage approval.
Essential to the technical implementation were 3 core components: Scalability, Security, and Speed. By synchronizing these into The Mortgage Map’s technology Aware could meet the set-out business goals and provide The Mortgage Trail’s clients an optimal user experience.
Business Demands
The Mortgage Trail were looking for a suite of technologies that would provide the appropriate technical infrastructure in their formative stages and provide easy scalability when supporting their ongoing growth. They wanted guaranteed, reliable up-time so that their clients and partners could access the website and the mobile application whenever they needed to.
Dealing with sensitive data they also needed a robust security protocol that allowed them to securely host and manage sensitive documentation paired with high availability to allow their users to upload and download documentation effectively.
A great user experience is a prerequisite when developing applications and building websites, especially when building trust in your product and with your clients. Speed and high availability were key factors to the success of The Mortgage Map application, the website, and the brand - providing a user experience that was easy, efficient, and ultimately one that could be trusted.
Solution
.Cloud-backed technology seemed the natural fit, providing reliable up-time and the capability to scale as the business grew. Aware felt the AWS EC2 (Elastic Cloud Compute) and Amazon RDS provided the appropriate Infrastructure to enable The Mortgage Trail to meet their business goals. Reliable uptime of up to 99.9%, easy scalability and flexibility in the infrastructure, Amazon’s Virtual Private Cloud for security, and the automation of time- consuming administrative tasks.
The capability to upload, download, store and manage data is essential to the success of this application, both from the brokers and the applicant’s point of view. Aware chose to utilize Amazon’s S3 Bucket primarily for its robust security protocol paired with its ease of use and reliability. All data is encrypted, there is no public access, and applications are integrated via API calls. Aware knew that this would prove to be a reliable and secure tool for The Mortgage Trail and its users.
To meet the expectation of the users on the front-end and manage traffic on The Mortgage Map application and The Mortgage Trail website, Aware utilized Amazon Route 53 and accompanying Elastic Load Balancers, to assist in managing traffic through the site and application ensuring high availability and exceptional user performance and experience.
The Aware AWS Managed Service team, provides ongoing technical support to The Mortgage Trail, utilizing Aware’s in-house skills and experience along with the Amazon CloudWatch monitoring tool for the creations of alerts and notifications.
Solution Suite
• Amazon EC2 - Infrastructure
• Amazon Relational Database Services (RDS)
• Amazon S3 Bucket – Cloud Storage
• Amazon Route 53 & Load Balancers – User Routing
• Amazon CloudWatch – Monitoring & Alerting