Platform upgrade for a nonprofit education & research organization
We helped the customer ensure their platform’s stability to sustain 50% user base growth and minimize its maintenance costs by making it more future-proof.
Context
Our customer is an education and research-focused organization operating as a nonprofit. Their primary area of work centers on sustainable development, with an emphasis on planning and engineering within urban environments. Since its founding in 2007, the organization has provided tools, resources, and strategic guidance to help global communities build more resilient and sustainable infrastructures.
To support these efforts, the customer has a platform designed to evaluate the sustainability and resilience of infrastructure systems. It also supports the company’s other key activities, including:
- Offering education and training on sustainability topics
- Evaluating and rating infrastructure initiatives
- Operating a membership program that provides access to resources, professional development, and project validation services
As part of their growth strategy, the customer sought to upgrade their platform to support a larger user base and increasing system demands. They chose Itransition based on our expertise in web application development for education and nonprofit sectors to ensure the platform’s scalability and reliable performance.
Solution
Audit
Itransition’s team started by analyzing the existing platform setup, including code quality audit. Upon completion, we provided the customer with a list of improvements to increase the platform’s flexibility, scalability, and data security and access control.
The list of improvements included:
- Establishing independent modules and separating presentation and business logic layers
- Introducing a new UI framework that would be easy to update and support
- Distributing the platform’s workload across multiple servers
- Enhancing the security of administrator interfaces and access controls
- Setting up server-side data validation
- Implementing cache-friendly data structures
Our experts concluded that the platform was not future-proof, as existing architectural constraints made it hard to scale and expand and would eventually lead to increased cost of ownership and delayed feature releases. Thus, Itransition’s team recommended rebuilding the platform to make it more sustainable, scalable, and cost-effective in the long run.
RedevelopmentÂ
Itransition’s team created a simple architecture with a single code base and database. It allowed the customer to easily adapt the platform to future versions.
The updated platform consists of several modules with their own user flows. Through integrations with external systems, it supports user learning and certification. Users can access a variety of educational materials, such as training sessions, online events, and more. The platform also includes tools for verifying projects and recognizing achievements based on predefined criteria. Additionally, administrators can view and manage data related to user engagement, training progress, memberships, financial transactions, and more. This information can then be analyzed to improve content and overall offerings provided by the customer.
Simultaneously with the development, we conducted quality assurance of the delivered features and passed the functionality for user acceptance testing. To ensure the platform’s uninterrupted performance, we provided the customer with support and maintenance services.
Thanks to the AWS-based architecture that ensured the platform’s stability and scalability, as well as the high quality assured by our specialists, the support costs of the solution decreased twice.
Results
Through our collaboration, the customer got a highly stable platform that fully supports their education and verification programs. By deploying the platform on AWS, we improved the uptime from 88% to 99.95%. This transformation allowed the customer to shift resources previously tied up in platform maintenance toward driving its future innovation and growth.
As a result, the customer’s user base expanded by 1.5x, and their platform is now trusted by several hundred cities and agencies worldwide, serving a community of more than 10,000 registered professionals all contributing to the global sustainability movement.
