Alert SA is an emergency services smart phone application that provides timely, relevant bushfire information to communities across the state.

Based on the hugely successful Fires Near Me app in New South Wales, Alert SA publishes data from the South Australian Country Fire Service (CFS) and displays bushfire alerts, warnings and updates as well as Fire Danger Ratings and Total Fire Ban information.

Users are also able to create multiple Watch Zones, specifying areas across the state which are of interest to them.

The Alert SA app has undergone extensive user acceptance testing to ensure it is reliable and able to withstand large volumes of users during peak periods. This was demonstrated during the devastating bushfires in South Australia’s Cudlee Creek and Kangaroo Island.

Along with its award-winning mobile app experience developing emergency communication platform (NSWRFS Fires Near Me app), Arq brought it additional capability in the cloud space, delivering a full suite of consumer experiences across both Android, iOS and web for Alert SA, including Cloud managed services, severless middleware and customer support.

Personalisation and usability were vital design drivers – the right information delivered in the right way at the right time to the general public, especially when it came to sending out alerts of approaching bushfires, which users could easily setup by creating ‘Watch Zones’ at any location on the map.

Alert SA was designed and developed as a highly performant, available and scalable, regional fault tolerant AWS cloud native solution to be able to quickly deliver push notification messages to impacted devices by a fire incident.

AWS Services Leveraged

A number of key AWS services were utilised in the delivery on this native cloud application, including AWS Lambda, AWS Cognito Authentication Service, AWS DynamoDB, AWS Kinesis, AWS Simple Storage Service (S3), Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS), Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) and AWS Aurora PostgreSQL.

Key system features:   

• Being regional fault tolerant – apart from being available across multiple AZs, the system is operating in two regions.  
• Using fully managed infrastructure – always live with minimal operational maintenance and support   
• Built with highly scalable serverless resources – utilising scalable serverless resources such as Lambda functions, SQS, DynamoDB, Kinesis, Cognito and S3.   
• Connected microservice oriented system modules – deliver system messages using event streams   
• Managed Infrastructure as code – hassle free deployment with no stack drifts 

Built to scale

Arq performed a major scalability test using AWS lambda, during load testing in a single region with no indicated instability. This is the new standard for performance for emergency communication platforms of this scale and Arq are proud to be leading the way in designing application that scale when it matters most.    

ARQ’s team of data scientists and developers employ the latest in cloud technology and open source machine learning by devising a novel solution to a complex problem. The beauty of the solution lies in three parts:

1. Optical character recognition with Amazon Textract, augmented with carefully designed heuristics extracting text in the correct reading order from insurance policies (PDF or image);
2. A hybrid of natural language deep learning models and rule-based methods consistently identify important details from each policy, providing a meaningful summary; and
3. Create a human-in-the-loop web interface and pipeline validating predictions. The solution provides labelled training data as new policies are received.

The trifecta solution provides exceptional user experience while collecting labelled training data. Now automated insurance policy summaries are constantly improved and refined.

Building with AWS ensures WrApp is supported by best in class security with encryption in transit and at rest. Secure S3 and DynamoDB storage within Australia and secure social media sign-in with authentication provided by Amazon Cognito.

To ensure best practice in security and design, WrApp architecture has been reviewed and validated by ARQ’s Senior Solution Architects and our AWS Partner Architect.

Domino’s are a digitally-led operation with more than 70% of revenue generated online. Domino’s on-premise infrastructure was frequently down. Outages were very costly. Scalability is non-negotiable in such high traffic environments. Domino’s needed a best in class partner to move to the cloud with expertise in managing continuous change. ARQ received the call…

The ‘weekly member touchpoint’ philosophy adopted during the design sprint had over 500 users actively shaping the app experience through participative research and design validation methods. The design team pushed limits, bringing together the best of design thinking: user-centred design, design strategy, and crowdsourced experience decision making. Prototyping extended beyond standard core utility capabilities by adding intuitive interactive visualisation tools and smart nudges providing members with more visibility (future projections) and control over their superannuation. The experience strategy was centred around providing the ‘easiest way to grow your Super and retirement, anywhere and anytime’.

Arq brought its experience of cloud migrations combined with our capability in the Data & Analytics space to refactor the data store into an AWS Data lake and Data warehouse solution that modernized the D&A capability. The solution allows for more data sources, data quality checks and visualization. Arq built the solution in AWS to create collection services, Share and Discover services Monitoring and Quality management framework and Consumption services.

• AWS Step functions are used to schedule and orchestrate the end to end
• ELT daily batch process
• AWS SFTP Transfer Service enables the transfer of files directly into and out of Amazon S3 using the Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP). Source systems currently writing files out to the MDKL SFTP site were provided with the new AWS SFTP address which will result in the file being directly written to the AWS S3 bucket source system landing bucket
• AWS Glue ETL service is leveraged to create jobs and schedule Glue jobs that extract data from database tables into CSV files on to the AWS S3 bucket source system landing bucket
• AWS Glue Data Catalog the Glue data catalog will be leveraged to catalog the files and their structures in the S3 Buckets. The data catalog can be referenced as part of the data quality framework to check file structures / changes and a simple data governance process
• AWS Simple Storage Service (S3) buckets is used store collected data
• AWS Simple Queue Services (SQS) is used to manage and track what files have been ingested and need to be processed through the landing, curated and redshift staging layers of the solution
• AWS Elastic Container is used as virtual servers to execute python scripts
• AWS Batch is used to execute the SQL transform scripts on Amazon Redshift.
• AWS Redshift is used as the Enterprise Data Warehouse database
• AWS RDS database is used to store the ELT process and Data Quality process metadata
• AWS Cloudwatch is used to monitor key events through the ELT batch and Data quality processes and to trigger relevant process functions and notifications

Arq ran a design thinking product sprint to understand and unpack GBST’s problem statement. Within a matter of days, our workshop and rapid prototyping enabled us to establish the highest value functions to be included in an innovation prototype. From there, GBST and Arq Group were ready to bring ‘Syndy’, a voice enabled virtual assistant, to life.

By partnering with Arq and AWS, GBST has been able to integrate with Amazon LEX™, allowing operators to augment their use of the system through voice queries and commands.

With the help of a virtual assistant called ‘Syndy’, system operators can analyse, investigate and manage exceptions efficiently and respond to queries whilst not interrupting workflows.

The new Syn~TAC SaaS offering builds on the success of Syn~TAC, the industry’s leading equities and fixed income middle office engine. Syn~TAC is installed at customer sites globally, including some of the world’s leading broker-dealers and Investment Banks, performing bookings, allocation, affirmation and confirmation functions in a fully workflow-enabled, browser-based solution.

As part of its cloud-enablement strategy, GBST has deployed the leading Syn~TAC system into AWS, allowing broker-dealers to onboard to the service within days rather than months. Syn~TAC has been architected for multi-tenancy, horizontal scalability and secure browser-based access so moving to a SaaS offering was a natural evolution of GBST’s cloud journey