About Hidden Strength
Hidden Strength is a unique mental health platform for young people aged 13-24, offering meaningful support, advice and guidance in a safe, anonymous environment.
Support is both peer-to-peer, and in the form of fully-qualified therapists available on demand using secure virtual environments. The platform also provides holistic mental well-being tools allowing the community to access a range of online education and activities.
They are the first mental health portal to build an online community that serves its users in keeping with their digital lives. Content provided by mental health experts aims to give young people the tools to deal with life’s challenges.
The Challenge
The app provides teenagers and young people with access to counselling from professionals, as well as self-help articles and videos from verified sources and social media influencers.
They had already started to develop the app using technologies within the AWS ecosystem, but with a high-profile launch event and addressable market of 9 million young people, they wanted to guarantee it could scale to meet potential demand and be reliable in the process.
Given the sensitive nature of the data handled within the app, Hidden Strength also wanted to ensure they met and complied with all relevant data security legislation and best practice to ensure young peoples’ information was protected. Hidden Strength engaged with Devoteam in April 2021 with a goal of delivering a secure and scalable production platform to ensure a successful launch event.
The Solution
Following a review of Hidden Strength’s existing AWS environment and app, Devoteam worked to design a Well-Architected AWS infrastructure that could be delivered in phases within a tight timescale, to provide the minimum viable product for their staggered launch events without compromising on security or reliability.
The planning resulted in a set of initial designs and an approach to the project which delivered a functional platform to Hidden Strength in time for their initial launch event, as well as continuous knowledge transfer to the Hidden Strength team enabling them to continue to refine and develop their infrastructure in a Well-Architected manner as their app evolved.
The delivery of the project was a joint team exercise with clear lines of responsibility:
- Devoteam delivered the planning and design tasks in collaboration with Hidden Strength before completing a full AWS deployment, all using infrastructure-as-code. Knowledge transfer and training of the Hidden Strength team was also carried out during this activity; Hidden Strength continued to develop and deploy their app code to the AWS environment in tandem with infrastructure build activities to facilitate ongoing testing;
- Devoteam and Hidden Strength worked closely together to load test the system, enabling proactive identification and remediation of resource and application bottlenecks.
The Benefits
As a result of the engagement delivered by Devoteam, Hidden Strength were able to launch their app on-time, knowing the platform was secure and confident that it could withstand the demands of their addressable market based upon data-backed testing.
They now have the underpinnings of a Well-Architected AWS ecosystem that is fully documented in infrastructure-as-code, upon which their team can continue to build with their new-found knowledge.
They are now well-positioned to innovate and grow their platform, and deliver more functionality to young people with the backing of AWS. All with the confidence of having a solid set of Cloud foundations.
“Not only did they mobilise incredibly quickly to respond to our ridiculously timeframes but they delivered a great solution ahead of schedule. I can honestly say that without Devoteam’ involvement I don’t think we would have been able to go live with a Well-Architected solution on time.”
Chris Owen-SmithCTO at Hidden Strength
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