2bcloud Architects Housetable’s Secure AWS Environment, Providing Compliance & ML Functionality

Housetable helps homeowners get the most out of their home equity by using artificial intelligence (AI) and data science to predict the value of their homes after renovation. This information helps homeowners secure financing that reflects the true worth of their property. Using its AI-powered renovation intelligence, Housetable provides customers with a fully digital experience through a mobile app that expedites applications, handles dynamic approvals, and manages integrated payments from banks and directly to remodeling contractors.

Housetable’s business challenge was to build a secure and optimized cloud environment to support an AI-powered renovation intelligence solution that predicts the value of a customer’s home after renovation. The company required deep expertise, smart security, inherent regulatory compliance, and cost efficiencies to ensure their solution could handle sensitive personal identifiable information (PII) and comply with payment card industry (PCI) regulations ISO 27001 and SOC. Housetable also wanted to streamline operating costs as they were working on credit during the startup phase.

If these challenges were not addressed, Housetable would be at risk of non-compliance with regulations and face data breaches. Exposure of customer PII could lead to reputational damage and loss of trust. Inadequate cloud infrastructure could hamper development of Housetable’s AI-based solution and impede time to market, which could result in loss of customers to competitors. Additionally, without cost efficiencies, Housetable’s financial stability would be at risk, making it challenging to continue operations and grow the business.

Housetable sought a managed service provider (MSP) that could provide deep expertise, smart security, inherent compliance, and cost efficiencies. With a recommendations from AWS, Housetable partnered with 2bcloud to help build a secure, optimized cloud environment on AWS. The resulting solution was based on best practices, Terraform automation, and a clear separation of environments for access control, providing Housetable with future-focused readiness for compliance regulations. By partnering with 2bcloud, Housetable benefited from a complete data science environment, a fully redundant and secure architecture, automated processes, and a clearly separated environment for streamlines access control and regulatory compliance. 2bcloud helped Housetable achieve these benefits by using a broad range of AWS services and technologies.

A primary AWS service used in the Housetable solution was AWS SageMaker, a fully managed machine learning (ML) service that enables data scientists and developers to quickly and easily build, train, and deploy ML models at any scale. 2bcloud helped the Housetable team become proficient on AWS SageMaker, and in developing the algorithms and ML tools on the back end to launch the solution’s three elements: the customer mobile application, the admin portal, and the contractor portal. Using AI and data science, the resulting Housetable solution can predict how much customer homes will be worth after renovation and to support customers in securing financing that reflects the full value of their property.

Another important AWS service used in the solution was Amazon S3, an object storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance. 2bcloud recommended S3 as a storage solution because it enables multiple accounts to access the output from AWS SageMaker. This efficient approach allowed Housetable to store and retrieve large amounts of data in a secure and cost-effective manner. In addition, 2bcloud incorporated a Content Delivery Network (CDN) with DNS (R53) to expedite responses for the solution’s web interface.

Housetable’s partnership with 2bcloud yielded significant benefits. The most notable outcome is that Housetable now has a fully optimized, secure, and compliant cloud environment that supports their AI-powered renovation intelligence solution. The cloud environment is built on best practices with AWS and is designed to be fully redundant in case of a disaster. The environment has also been designed to meet regulatory requirements, ensuring that PII is handled securely without impeding day-to-day business activities.

The optimized cloud environment reduced Housetable’s operating costs from day one by ensuring efficient and effective business operations and customer engagements. With the implementation of Terraform, the environment is also highly automated, enabling Housetable to complete a dry run without customer data to securely test the system before production. Additionally, the clearly separated environment streamlines access control, giving employees the exact permissions they need without exposing the environment to unnecessary risk. With the support of 2bcloud, the Housetable team has become proficient on AWS SageMaker and mastered the ML tools required to launch the customer mobile application, admin portal, and contractor portal.

Specific results include:

• Reduced Housetable’s deployment time from three months to just three weeks.
• Decreased Housetable’s IT infrastructure costs by 50%.
• Improved Housetable’s scalability and performance, enabling them to handle 10 times the traffic with no issues.
• Ensured 99.999% availability of Housetable’s services through a high-availability architecture and automated disaster recovery.
• Provided Housetable with real-time monitoring and alerts for their services, leading to faster issue resolution and improved uptime.
• Enabled Housetable to achieve compliance with industry standards such as PCI-DSS and GDPR, reducing the risk of regulatory penalties.
• Helped Housetable implement DevOps best practices to accelerate development cycles and improve agility.

About the Partner

2bcloud is a born-to-the-cloud next-gen managed service provider (MSP) that works with fast-growing, cloud-native startups. 2bcloud leverages its multi-cloud expertise working with AWS to help customers grow revenue, increase efficiency, reduce cost, and deliver scalable experiences. The company’s field-proven technology stack is backed by deep experts and includes managed services, cost optimization, expert consultancy, and 24/7 technical support.