Caylent Services
Data Modernization & Analytics
From implementing data lakes and migrating off commercial databases to optimizing data flows between systems, turn your data into insights with AWS cloud native data services.
Talent success company migrates from Snowflake to AWS with Amazon Redshift Serverless
Data Modernization & Analytics
Infrastructure & DevOps Modernization
SaaS & ISV
Migrating their data infrastructure to Amazon Redshift Serverless with Caylent, Criteria unlocked new features and capabilities specific to their needs, allowing them to silo data and leverage it for querying and insights. The new infrastructure is highly robust, scalable and more cost efficient, helping Criteria reduce data infrastructure expenses by 40%.
Criteria is a talent success company that creates world-leading tools to help organizations make more objective, evidence-based talent decisions that both reduce bias and drive better outcomes. Criteria’s primary offerings include a pre-employment assessment platform along with structured interviewing tools to make it easy to administer, manage candidate pipeline, and interpret results.
Founded in 2006 in Los Angeles, California, Criteria’s mission is to take powerfully predictive science and make it accessible to organizations, delivering 40M+ tests to more than 4500 customers across 60 countries. The company has been immensely successful, featured on the Inc. 5000 for eight consecutive years, and scaled to a team of over 150 people!
Challenge
Led by their CTO, Criteria was looking to move their data infrastructure from a complex multi-product infrastructure, including Snowflake, to a simpler AWS managed infrastructure to gain an economical advantage without losing functionality. The company realized that their existing infrastructure was expensive, and used less than 20% of the available feature set. To align with this strategic pivot, Criteria was looking for a partner to help them design and deploy data lakehouse infrastructure leveraging native AWS managed services. The new data infrastructure needed to be secure, scalable, highly available, and cost-effective.
Solution
Cost and simplicity was a critical consideration for Criteria, motivating their migration away from their current implementation of Snowflake and other tools. Caylent built a new data lakehouse on Amazon Redshift Serverless to optimize Criteria’s environment with a resilient and reliable data infrastructure that could scale cost-effectively without affecting any of the functionality Criteria enjoyed in their prior infrastructure. Caylent leveraged AWS Lake Formation to build a serverless data lake while allowing Criteria to easily define their own access rules.
Caylent also modernized other necessary components of Criteria’s data infrastructure. The team leveraged AWS Lambda & AWS Step Functions to clean and improve the quality of data before ingestion into Amazon Redshift from AWS DynamoDB – one of their main data sources. The team also built AWS Glue Pipelines with respective rule sets to help Criteria discover, prepare, move, and integrate data from their existing Amazon Aurora MySQL database as well as the new data lakehouse Caylent built on Redshift. Additionally, Caylent improved Criteria’s CI/CD process to automate several existing and newly introduced processes using AWS CDK, CircleCI, and Github.
Caylent developed new key functionality to ensure Criteria’s Personally Identifiable Information (PII) data would adhere to regulations in the new Redshift environment. Criteria wanted to retain query capabilities across data from both USA and AUS while making sure that data did not leave its originating region and was in compliance with data sovereignty principles. To achieve this, Caylent deployed the same technology stack across both of Criteria’s operational regions. Redshift’s data sharing was expertly leveraged to share live data with security and ease across Amazon Redshift clusters in separate AWS regions.
Criteria also wanted to create a data culture across their business and build governance to responsibly provide broader insights to business units beyond the data team. Caylent enabled this by automating data access provision and management, setting up Amazon QuickSight dashboarding and establishing standards for Criteria’s teams to find, understand and leverage their data.
Outcome
Adopting AWS native data services, Criteria can now focus on a tighter ecosystem, rather than spreading resources and talent across multiple platforms.
In addition to simplicity and cost effectiveness, Criteria realized benefits of improved data access and governance along with better data quality, consistency, and accuracy. These outcomes help Criteria deliver value to customers and candidates while mitigating potential security and compliance risks. As a data rich SaaS company, Criteria relies on sophisticated data infrastructure to deliver innovations that help customers and candidates achieve talent success.
Caylent’s attention to detail and diligence during the project hand-over allowed Criteria’s team to successfully take over all aspects of the infrastructure and seamlessly expand on the foundation created. Criteria has experienced no critical downtime or issues since hand-off, a testament to Caylent’s expertise, and can deliver new data functionality to production in hours rather than days.
