Black Knight Cloud Strategy Accelerates Innovation in a Secure Environment

Black Knight (NYSE:BKI) is a software, data, and analytics company that drives innovation in mortgage lending, servicing, and the secondary markets. Businesses use our robust, integrated solutions across the entire home ownership lifecycle to help retain existing customers, gain new customers, mitigate risk, and operate more effectively. Our clients rely on our proven, comprehensive, and scalable products, as well as our commitment to delivering superior client support to achieve their strategic goals and better serve their customers.

This post (1 of 3), provides an overview of how Black Knight has used AWS to help consolidate acquisitions, accelerate innovation, and increase operational speed and capacity within a secure environment.

In these posts, we cover:

• Origins of Black Knight’s relationship with AWS and current scope of engagements
• How AWS helped Black Knight integrate, scale, and monetize several recent acquisitions
• How cloud connectivity has also helped improve our core operations and accelerated innovation by making data more widely available and lowering experimentation costs

Black Knight’s cloud journey with AWS

At Black Knight we’ve always considered ourselves at the forefront of technology. However, in a regulated industry adoption of new capabilities is often slow.

For the sake of our customers, we knew the long-term strategy would be the public cloud, as it provides us the capabilities to better innovate on their behalf.

Our journey to the Cloud began in earnest with the acquisition of a company already in production on AWS. The acquired company had great depth and talent in artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML), which utilized multiple AWS services, including AWS Lambda, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and Amazon Neptune. Serverless capabilities weren’t available in our owned data centers. Our growing relationship with AWS, which now spans over 60 AWS services, continues to help Black Knight not only transform our own operations, but also strengthen client relationships by enabling us to deliver our services efficiently and securely in a manner that meets clients wherever they are in their own cloud journey.

In this series, we wanted to share 1/ how we built the secure foundations to drive innovation, 2/ key impactful outcomes to date, and 3/ major initiatives that are helping us re-imagine our key applications

Building secure foundations for innovation

Due to the sensitive nature of mortgage industry data, information security has always been of utmost importance at Black Knight. For this reason, the collection, use, and retention of non-public information (NPI) and personal identifiable information (PII), has historically been managed in owned data centers. AWS worked with Black Knight to define a comprehensive security solution and governance process to make sure that our decision to shift the processing of sensitive data to AWS continued to meet our robust security standards.

Strict policies and procedures needed to be developed to make sure that we could protect the data and provide resiliency at levels equal to or greater than those of our owned data centers.

• AWS worked with the Black Knight Information Security Office (ISO) and Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) team to update our policies to reflect a new data protection model for cloud-based client data. This model creates multiple environments where AWS services can be evaluated for use and risk can be managed. For example, we’ve brought our own AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) keys and leverage Amazon Macie for PII identification. Only services that pass this review process can be used in next level environments up through production.
• By using Terraform and Hashicorp’s Sentinel products, Black Knight was able to create a process model of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to lay down embedded security policies while environments were built to make sure that only AWS services that had been through the vetting process were utilized.
• Black Knight created DevOps and SysOps teams to focus on cloud migrations and deployments. We implemented continuous integration/continuous development (CI/CD) in the development process to automate the deployments to an AWS cloud environment. This further reduced risk by eliminating opportunities for human error while increasing processing velocity exponentially.
• Black Knight’s approach to resiliency currently relies on multi-region deployments in US-East-1 and US-East-2 with infrastructure being provisioned as needed. Using Terraform, Amazon Route 53, Amazon S3 cross-region replication, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) snapshots and replicas, Amazon DynamoDb global tables, Lambda and other services, the infrastructure is making sure of automated failover and low recovery thresholds for our business applications. These, in combination with emphasis on the Operational Excellence pillar, reframing of our Chaos Engineering checklist, Game Days and BK University events on resilience, and DR are resulting in architecturally sound patterns and capabilities.

Impactful outcomes

Black Knight’s journey to the AWS cloud has evolved into a hybrid approach over the last few years. By 2020, we were up and running, which meant that with the foundations in place we could shift to innovation.

Re-imagining our applications to utilize cloud-native technologies has been a driving force in all AWS migration projects. Although our cloud architects are constantly looking for opportunities to re-platform to modernize application frameworks, our technology executives are utilizing the new and flexible development platforms in AWS.

These cloud development platforms have provided a constant stream of innovation, making it faster to produce more intelligent applications using serverless, automation, and artificial intelligence decisioning services.

The combination of innovative cloud solutions and rapid deployment processes has given Black Knight the ability to securely migrate many of its acquisitions to AWS.

Reimagining our key applications

The Cloud technology value proposition was great, but we also had to rethink our core processes  to fully leverage the innovation levels that the Cloud enables.

One of our major initiatives in the space of document extraction using AWS ML capabilities was documented this year in a post we published in July.

Our artificial intelligence virtual assistant (AIVA) is a game changing tool that is already impacting the mortgage industry. With capabilities to read, process, and classify millions of load documents from banks and lenders combined with Amazon Textract, AIVA can drastically decrease transaction costs, increase transaction capacity, and reduce transaction times. This was built on a comprehensive serverless architecture comprising all major AWS services, as illustrated in the following figure.

Fig.1 – Serverless architecture and managed services at Black Knight

Many of our other major products now reside in AWS. These include:

1. Expedite, a signing capability that increases scalability and elasticity for loan origination, which was containerized and migrated to AWS.
2. DocVerify, which provides proof of integrity of digital documents by verifying their content, creator, and creation date, as well as remote closings, reducing risk, and simplifying overall process integration.
3. LoanCatcher, an innovative easy-to-use loan origination system designed for mortgage brokers.
4. Exchange, a hosted marketplace for lender and provider services that has reduced costs and simplified business integration after the migration out of our data centers.
5. Ernst, a loan origination fee management platform that has been moved from CoLo to AWS.
6. Empower, a highly-configurable, multi-channel loan origination system, which has migrated deployments to AWS, thereby accelerating speed to market for environment creation and increases in scalability and elasticity.

These and many other initiatives have further strengthened Black Knight’s position in the marketplace as we continue to drive impactful innovations.

The adoption of AWS Cloud technologies and capabilities has helped Black Knight address the growing complexity of the entire real estate-mortgage continuum. Using AWS, the company is continuing to advance and scale its foundational capabilities, as well as deliver products that optimize the entire mortgage lifecycle. In turn, we help lenders, real-estate, and capital markets firms realize greater efficiencies, drive improved financial performance, and better manage and mitigate risk.