Evolv Technology

Executive Summary

Evolv’s Express system is a free-flow weapons-detection system for scanning humans. The initial release of this groundbreaking product was standalone devices, installed at customer sites.

Evolv partnered with VividCloud in pursuit of a much broader scope that included data analytics, machine learning, and data fusion. The original architecture with its embedded processing, local data storage, and a UI/UX attached to each freestanding system had to evolve into a modern, smart IIoT network to achieve their goals.

Key Challenges

• Existing system design prevented scaling Evolv’s excellent product
• Global support was impractical with individual monitoring
• A new multi-tenant Cloud presence was required for data collection
• Ever-increasing demands for freestanding security at venues

Solutions

By turning the Express system into a network of smart, connected, Industrial IoT devices, a much more ambitious roadmap of new and expanded features became possible. The migration was successfully tackled in several well-planned pieces.

UI application migration

VividCloud rearchitected the legacy software into a Progressive Web Application (PWA) in Angular to improve the UX. This allowed it to be used immediately on Android and Windows devices. As a PWA, it could be run on a variety of other platforms, including MacOS and iOS.

Dashboards and AWS multi-tenant data

The legacy system only surfaced local data. VividCloud architected an AWS replacement to store global Express usage and performance data. Data pipelines that capture, process, and store the scanner data also use Tableau visualizations for monitoring results in the new dashboard applications.

Security best practices

To meet security standards including tenant data encryption, a strict separation of environments was implemented to avoid exposing production data to lower security environments. VividCloud implemented an AWS Account Landing Zone leveraging AWS Control Tower.

AWS Services Provided

• AWS Control Tower to set up an OU for Evolv Technology
• AWS Route 53 hosted zones, and DNS records to provide access to the user/administrator
• AWS VPC Security Groups, IGWs, NATs, subnets, and route tables to provide a secure networking environment
• AWS ELBv2, Target Groups to route traffic to the Tableau Server Cluster
• AWS Certificate Manager to terminate HTTPS on the ELBv2
• AWS Auto Scaling Groups to scale the Tableau cluster based on usage
• AWS Lambda to perform IoT-based workloads as well as prove endpoints exposed via API Gateway
• AWS API Gateway to expose a Rest API endpoint used primarily by the UI
• AWS CloudWatch Logs, Metrics, and Alarms to simplify monitoring
• AWS DynamoDB to store customer-related information
• AWS IoT Core to run jobs on scanner hardware as well as receive scanner data for analytics

• AWS IAM roles and policies to grant access to AWS resources
• AWS SSO to provide access to the AWS Accounts
• AWS Service Catalog to provision AWS Accounts
• AWS CloudTrail to audit activities in the AWS Accounts
• AWS S3 to store CloudTrail logs, store scanner data and analytic results, and host the Web UI
• AWS SQS to process S3 notifications
• AWS CloudFront to deliver static web content
• AWS SNS topics used to notify irregularities to the support team
• AWS KMS to encrypt data stored in EBS volumes/snapshots, SSM Parameter Store, and DynamoDB content
• AWS SSM Parameter Store to store credentials used by the application
• AWS CloudFormation and StackSets to provision AWS Accounts

End Results

The Evolv AWS platform was deployed on schedule and operational with every Express system.

Evolv Technology has grown its annual revenue by 136% to $55.2 million.