AWS Security Architecture and Design

The Challenge

ADHD America aims to help children navigate the trials of living with ADHD. About 10% of school-aged children in America are diagnosed and live with ADHD, and for them, the current educational system often starts on a path of struggle. For example, half of children with ADHD repeat a grade by adolescence, and 80% are two years behind academically by age 11. If unaddressed, the consequences of ADHD magnify as these children grow into adulthood. ADHD America wanted to empower kids with a transformative technology solution to help manage their disorder.

Why Amazon Web Services

Entrata was already benefiting from the use of Amazon Web Services (AWS) for various data needs. However, they were interested in determining a solution—leveraging AWS machine learning services—that integrated with their existing AWS infrastructure and would be flexible enough to address Entrata’s need to deliver accurate forecasting to maximize profits for their customers while minimizing unrented units.

Founded as a side project by an Amazon Web Services (AWS) partner development manager, ADHD America naturally turned to AWS to support their environment. As a nonprofit, the ADHD America team partnered with several consulting and technology organizations to develop the ADHDmyway mobile application, with all work provided on a volunteer basis. Any solution that handles Protected Health Information (PHI) must be secure and HIPAA-compliant. As an AWS Premier Consulting Partner, 1Strategy holds many competencies and was specifically asked to contribute to this project because of extensive experience developing secure solutions. 1Strategy enthusiastically agreed to help.

“We chose 1Strategy because not only do they have a great reputation, but they also have the expertise that we needed to lay the security groundwork”, stated Andy Hall, chief technology officer of ADHD America. “It was absolutely essential that we followed all of the security best practices in order to make sure that we work with PHI data in a governed and compliant manner. In our conversations with leaders at 1Strategy, it was apparent that they have the ability to chart our security course for the current and future state of our systems.”

The Benefits

Designed by ADHD coaches, ADHDmyway empowers kids to effectively gain control of their situations—and to help their providers and loved ones understand what is happening and determine how to best support and help them. Through the app, kids can privately journal and record their experiences and what they may be feeling or dealing with at a particular time. The information can be securely shared with their supportive healthcare providers and loved ones.

With a need to optimize ADHDmyway for benefit and cost, many AWS services were explored, including AWS Organizations, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), AWS CloudTrail, AWS Config, Amazon GuardDuty, AWS Security Hub, Amazon Cognito, AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF), Alexa Voice Service, Alexa Skill, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Lex, and Amazon Polly. A roadmap was developed based on the security pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework.

After the roadmap was reviewed and approved, 1Strategy worked alongside another partner to build the solution, ensuring that the proper security features were built in and implemented from the beginning. Foundational security components were deployed throughout the process of developing the solution, allowing the project team to go live with confidence. The project was highly collaborative. 1Strategy experts helped the ADHD America team dive into Lambda roles, provided security posture recommendations and drove action.

The team enabled trusted access for AWS services such as AWS CloudTrail, AWS Config and AWS Single Sign-On (SSO). This happened automatically when these services were enabled with organizational capabilities. The services allowed data from all accounts to be shared with the ADHD America management account.

An Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) was deployed, enabling the ADHDmyway mobile app to be highly secure while optimizing for scalability. 1Strategy experts were also able to provide cost-saving recommendations and suggested a configuration that favored security and reliability. AWS CloudTrail was used to deploy an organization trail that logs data from all accounts and regions in the organization, including Amazon S3 data storage events. Logs were then sent to Amazon S3 and Amazon CloudWatch for monitoring.

With an emphasis on building a secure solution that was HIPAA-compliant, 1Strategy team members worked with ADHDmyway project team members to build the following infrastructure. [ADHD-America-Ref-2.webp] “The work delivered by 1Strategy is vital to building the trust required in such a sensitive area of disorder management,” said Peter Gyurko, product owner of ADHDmyway. “With the foundational privacy elements in place, the ADHDmyway platform development has accelerated 10x and [is] ensuring we deliver a product in support of thousands of school-aged children with ADHD.”