Since 2014, Deutsche Telekom AG (DTAG) has run an employee threat management system internally. Dealing with all kinds of workplace issues and threats, the ultimate aim of the system is to ensure that each employee is treated with dignity and respect and to protect the company and its employees from harm.
Recognize: All kinds of violence have precursors. Identifying specific warning behaviours can help each employee recognize the threat of violence. Employees can report such warning behaviour to the threat management system.
Assess: The threat management system will then assess the criticality of the issue.
Defuse: The system implements countermeasures with all involved people to reduce the risk for the employee and the company.
All the business requirements for the TMA system mentioned above can be met using AWS. The TMA application leverages a modern containerization solution (Docker) using Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS). This is a fully managed container orchestration service for security, reliability, and scalability.
Security: Due to the nature of the project, the TMA data needs to be fully protected. AWS services like Key Management Service (KMS) and AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) helped us encrypt the data at rest and data in transit. EBS volumes and RDS PostgreSQL databases are encrypted using AWS KMS keys.
Deployments: To achieve minimal disruption to business, we have adopted zero downtime deployments using AWS Elastic Container Service. In the rolling update deployment type, the service has a desired number of two tasks and a maximum value of 200 percent, i.e. the scheduler may start two new tasks before stopping the two older tasks. We made sure that the cluster resources required to do this are available. The Application Load Balancer performs health checks on the new version of the application before the old version is replaced. Using the AWS CodePipeline/Elastic Container Service, we are able to achieve Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD). This helped us in providing much faster feedback to project teams, thus adopting Agile/DevOps culture.
Today, threat management is an integral part of Telekom’s personnel security in Germany. In fact, DTAG is the first company in Europe to employ a professional and firmly established Threat Management Assistant system.
Migrating the TMA system to AWS fulfilled all the business’s requirements, including flexibility, security, increased agility, scalability and improved business continuity. It also accelerated development of new features. Zero downtime deployments and AWS automated solutions contributed to a TMA cloud infrastructure with resulting benefits for operations.
