About Client

Lango Legal

Lango Legal is a technology-enabled language management ecosystem. The company’s services leverage automation, data, and human expertise to provide neural machine translations and human translations as well as interpretation, language-management strategy consulting, and bespoke linguistic solutions.

The Lango model allows clients to leverage the entire breadth of the language service industry—going beyond well-known language service providers—to procure vendors directly through the Lango platform with guidance from veteran industry experts.

Rapid Growth Drives Need for Additional Cloud Expertise Resources

Serving large law firms around the world—including many of the top 200 firms in the US—Lango Legal has experienced explosive growth right out of the gate. After a rapid round of acquisitions, the start-up needed to migrate a combination of on-premises and cloud IT infrastructures to its Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment.

“With our internal resources focused on application development and other resources operating at full capacity to manage our AWS environment, we needed help with the migrations,” says Daniel Noji, Vice President of Engineering at Lango. “We wanted to complete the migrations quickly so we could manage all the applications in one place. We also faced deadlines in moving the applications out of their previous environments.”

After launching the migration project, another pressing need emerged. A large client urgently requested a cutting-edge service that no one in the industry offered.

“Given that we process data for law firms, much of the information we handle is sensitive and falls under strict privacy regulations that our systems must comply with,” explains Jeff Schmidt, a Co-Founder and the Chief Revenue Officer for Lango. “An international client asked us to create a closed-loop human translation service for multiple languages that would lock down case information so it could not be copied or downloaded and would never leave the country of its origination.”

At the time, Lango already provided closed-loop neural machine translation services where all the translations are handled by computers. But creating a closed-loop same environment for human translation services would prove more difficult—especially with most translators working from home as subcontractors across the globe and thus requiring cloud access.

To meet the client’s stringent security requirements, the human translation service could not allow any public internet access or email connections. “Adding to his challenge was the pressure to deliver a solution for this client within two weeks,” Schmidt points out. “We needed to move fast.”

Avahi Takes Holistic Approach and Responds Immediately

Luckily for Lango, the answer to the closed-loop human translation service challenge was already onboard, thanks to Noji having found a partner to assist with the migrations.

“We asked AWS for a referral, and they recommended that we collaborate with Avahi,” Noji says. “We felt comfortable with Avahi because they broke down the migration process for us, and their timelines were achievable. We trust Avahi and appreciate their communication style of keeping us in the loop and offering suggestions to address any challenges we come across.”

Avahi also took a more holistic approach—considering the entire Lango tech stack and the design of the existing AWS infrastructure as opposed to just moving servers from the acquired environments to AWS. “Avahi mapped out how all of the applications could connect on AWS,” Noji says. “They also showed us how we could optimize the costs of our compute resources.”

For the closed-loop human translation service environment Lango required, Avahi responded immediately. “Avahi did not shy away—even with the twoweek timeframe we asked for,” Schmidt says. “They committed to getting the project done in less time, and they delivered.”

Creating a Secure and Restricted Environment

Avahi verified that the Merge AWS environment was designed and deployed correctly and capable of providing a highly-available service that can scale as customer demand increases. The Avahi team then advised on configuration changes to build a multi-tenant environment infrastructure that meets defined security standards and best practices to protect personal information.

To host the closed-loop human translation service, Avahi configured a highly-secure and restricted AWS WorkSpaces environment in which the subcontractors can work. Avahi programmed WorkSpaces to control how content is delivered to the translators and how long they have access to information. Lango also has visibility to make sure translators only execute authorized actions. WorkSpaces blocks public internet access, but Lango can apply application patches to keep it secure through an encrypted client connection that uses the PC over Internet Protocol.

To ensure the service passes security audits, Avahi removed the Firefox and Explorer web browsers normally installed on WorkSpaces. In addition, the translators have no admin rights so they can’t install apps and have no access to email. Avahi also customized AWS controls to securely store translated documents in Amazon S3 where they can be shared with authorized users through a virtual shared drive that also tracks changes. Once a translator finishes with a project, their access to the content is automatically removed.

As the WorkSpaces project wrapped up within a week, Avahi and Lango continued to keep the migration project moving forward. In addition to moving five applications to AWS environment, Avahi evaluated the environment against the AWS Well-Architected framework and recommended how to adjust the setup and configuration.

Avahi also ensured Lango had all the necessary security documentation and identified best practices to close security control gaps. By spinning up AWS Config and AWS Security Hub, Lango can tag compute resources and constantly monitor the environment. The IT team also receives alerts if any performance or security issues occur.

Improved Scalability and the Ability to Offer a New Service to Clients

With the enhanced cloud environment aligned with the AWS Well-Architected framework, Avahi has an automated way to scale compute resources up and down as application workloads change. “We set up triggers to know when an application is under heavy use so we can increase resources on-demand and maintain application performance,” says Noji. “And when the demand decreases, we scale down, which reduces our cloud costs. We don’t have to worry about degraded performance or overspending.”

The security measures Lango has deployed thanks to the Avahi recommendations will assist with SOC2, HIPAA, and FedRAMP compliance. This is a key benefit given that Lango clients provide legal services for companies across all industry sectors, including healthcare and government. Avahi also set up AWS Organizations to create a clear separation of compute resource usage by applications among the main company and the acquired companies. This assists with cost allocation and billing across the business entities.

“We initially started out wanting to offload the burden of handling the migrations to AWS from the other cloud and on-premise environments,” Noji says. “But Avahi expanded the value they delivered by identifying where we could enhance our environment so it’s more secure and scales easier.”

For Schmidt, he appreciates how Avahi has enabled Lango to add a new service to its portfolio—an ultra-secure cloud platform that is highly scalable and cost-effective for supporting human translation services. “We impressed our client by moving so quickly in delivering this new service,” Schmidt says. “Our responsiveness has strengthened that relationship and has prompted that client to expand the services they rely on.”

Lango also now has a closed-loop human translation service to offer on-demand to other clients, which creates a key competitive differentiator. “Even if a client doesn’t use the service, it symbolizes our innovative capabilities and our agility in responding to what our clients need,” Schmidt adds. “And that’s a huge factor in helping us expand our market.”

An Ideal Long-Term Partner

“We enjoyed working with Avahi—everyone on the team was responsive and helpful,” Schmidt concludes. “They provided a complete solution and brought in a dynamic set of resources with expertise in specific areas. We were grateful for the expedited timeframe so that we could tell our client we would meet their needs, and in doing so, we thoroughly impressed them.”

Noji envisions Lango will consider collaborating with Avahi again as new needs arise to further enhance the AWS environment. “If you’re looking for a partner to develop a long-term relationship who gives you clear recommendations and honest timelines, Avahi is the way to go,” Noji emphasizes.

“They provide a team of valuable resources who communicate effectively and are ready to move fast as we want them to. They ultimately helped us accelerate the time to complete the migration process and greatly reduced the cost compared to handling the project ourselves.”

Key Challenges

• Migrate cloud and on-premises applications to AWS.
• Build a highly-secure environment to host human translation services.
• Allow internal IT resources to focus on application development.

Key Results

• Deployed AWS WorkSpaces within one week to provide a secure platform for human translators.
• Accelerated the timeline and reduced the cost of five application migrations.
• Aligned environment to meet AWS Well-Architected framework requirements.
• Automated compute resources to scale up and down according to workload demands.
• Enhanced security controls to assist with regulatory compliance.

Third-Party Tools & Integrations

• Terraform (infrastructure as code)
• Virtual Shared Drive (Cloud Advisors)
• Ekran (user activity tracking)
• Microsoft Active Directory
• Duo (multi-factor authentication)

AWS Services

• AWS WorkSpaces
• Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)
• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
• AWS Organizations
• AWS Systems Manager
• Amazon CloudWatch
• AWS Config
• AWS Security Hub
• Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
• AWS Cost and Usage Reports
• Amazon Relational Database Service
• Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR)
• Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS)
• AWS Amplify
• AWS Elastic Beanstalk
• AWS App Mesh
• Amazon ElastiCache
• Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL
• Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)
• Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)
• Amazon Macie
• Amazon Inspector
• AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)
• AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF)
• Amazon Cognito
• Application Load Balancer (ALB)
• AWS Auto Scaling
• AWS App2Container
• AWS Cloud Map
• AWS Secrets Manager

AWS Architecture